What is Folding?

[ChicagoMac]

Folding is obviously not refering to clothes or paper, so would someone please tell me what it is. Just curious.

[britboy]

Do you mean the distributed computing program? If so, then you can find out all about it at http://folding.stanford.edu/. It's basically about using spare processing power on your computer to analyse protein information, to help research into different cancer treatments, HIV antidotes et all.

You should join the macrumors team. It's not going to do you any harm to put your computers idle time to use ;)

[topicolo]

Yeah, it's basically the attempt to develop a mathematical model to predict how a long string of amino acids fold up into a three dimenional protein. Those guys at Stanford are basically using our computers to test their models so that they can develop something that works.

[ChicagoMac]

Why do they need our computers?

[G4scott]

Originally posted by ChicagoMac
Why do they need our computers?

It's like having the world's most powerful supercomputer. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands on a super-computer that would still take ages to do all of the work, it's easier to distribute programs on the internet, and have other people process the data with their computers while they're not using them. It's really a good idea. It saves the school money, and puts idle computers to work.