Want to donate for a good cause? What if I told you it was free?
For our first Public Service Announcement, I wanted to discuss what the average person can do with their computer's excess CPU cycles. Specifically, I'm talking about the Folding@Home distributed computing program run by Stanford University. This program was started by the University to figure out how proteins in the human body change shape (or "fold", if you will) into new structures. Protein folding is essential for many tasks in the body, and when they misfold, problems can arise. Diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and many others have already been linked to proteins that don't fold the way they should. However, scientists still don't know exactly how or why a protein folds the way it does. This is were you come in.
Protein folding is a very complex process, and even for modern computers it requires a tremendous amount of time and processing power to simulate all the varieties and ways that a protein can fold or misfold. What Folding@Home (FAH) does, is to help break this enormous task into small chunks that can be processed on any average computer. FAH is a small, unobtrusive program that connects to Stanford, processes a folding simulation, and returns the results for their scientists to analyze. You can even see the individual molecules fold themselves on your screen if you wish. Already FAH has over 200,000 computers donating their excess CPU cycles towards this effort, and has generated over 50 papers for the science of protein folding. By understanding why proteins fold the way they do, we get one step closer to actually developing a cure for these diseases!
FAH is easy enough to run - simply download and install, and it takes care of the rest. It will automatically download a new chunk to process once it's finished the previous one. You can put in your name if you want, and join a FAH team, but this isn't required. What you get in return is the knowledge that you've contributed to a great cause, and may actually play a direct role in curing some of these diseases. There's no extensive forms to fill out, ads to annoy, or bloatware that slows down your computer (you can select how much idle processing power it will use). You may learn more about FAH (and download it) here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/
This is one cause that doesn't take much time to be a part of, and is completely free. Isn't finding new and ingenious uses for things one of the core values of hacking? I can't wait to see what FAH will discover.
Happy Hacking.
-Juno