Nilesh's Weblog

Burn CPU Burn

Yet another Distributed Computing App - Folding@Home [via Netahoy]. Since 1997, when Distributed.net made available for download the first distributed client app, there have been lots of distributed computing apps floating around on the Net, requesting for idle CPU cycles from users' computers. Perhaps the first application which captured the imaginations of people was SETI@Home, which is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. Folding@Home is a distributed client computing effort by Stanford University intended to help understand how proteins assemble or "fold." Exactly how proteins assemble themselves is a mystery, and why the proteins sometimes fold improperly or "misfold" is also a mystery. Quite a few serious diseases are related to the misfolding of proteins, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, to name two. By donating your CPU's spare cycles, you are contributing to the effort to understand how the proteins fold, which is the first step to understanding how basic proteins work and how we might treat these diseases. This project is supported by Google and you can also use the Google Compute app to do the number crunching.

If you think that a distributed app is going to eat up your frame rate while playing UT2003, here's a benchmark to clear your apprehension. While I am far from downloading the app for my already preoccupied and overclocked CPU, this article was an unlikely source for me to find a very decent piece of software, FireDaemon to daemonise my thousand perl scripts. BTW, a good introduction to Distributed Computing can be found in this extremetech.com article.