MidnightUT
Member
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2007
- Messages
- 53
The Idea: The idea of this project is to have all of us Ron Paul supporters donate our spare unused computer processing power to the Folding@Home research project in Dr. Paul’s name. Here is a link to the team statistics page, it was just created so there isn’t much to show yet:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=96878
The competition: So far there are three other presidential candidate teams. Obama's is the only one currently beating us. It currently only has one person participating, but they are beating us since they had a head start. With enough users we could easily catch up and pass them.
What is Folding@Home? The best answer and a lot more information can be found at the http://folding.stanford.edu website, specifically the FAQ page. In short, the Folding@Home project is a non-profit research organization ran by the Standford University Chemistry Department. The goal of the project is to study protein folding and misfolding by using the computing power of hundreds of thousands of individually owned computers around the world.
How does it work? The Folding@Home project makes use of distributed computing. Distributed computing just means using thousands of computers to calculate small pieces of a large problem, instead of using one big supercomputer to calculate one giant problem. That still doesn’t explain how exactly it works. First people from around the world download and install (instructions in the next post) the Folding@Home software from the Stanford website. This software is what coordinates all of the hundreds of thousands of computers around the world so that they can work together. The once installed and running the software contacts the Stanford servers and requests work. The servers send your computer some calculations to run. Once finished your computer returns the results to Stanford for analysis and requests more work.
Why is it important? A very in depth description of why the study of protein folding is important can be found at: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science Aside from a better understanding of protein folding in general, one of the main goals of the project is the study of protein misfolding. Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. People believe that if we can better understand why proteins misfold, that it can be used to better understand these diseases and hopefully prevent them or find cures.
How does it help Ron Paul? It doesn’t directly, it directly helps the Folding@Home non-profit research project. That being said I have created a RonPaul2008 Folding@Home team, that all of us can join our computers to (instructions in the next post). The F@H project tracks statistics both on an individual as well as the team level. My hope would be that several thousand of us computer savvy Ron Paul supporters could join our computers and see how high we can get our ranking. Here is a list of the top 100 ranked teams: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats It would be very hard for us to get up that high, but we will definitely be the #1 team supporting a presidential candidate. And who knows if we get enough support the main stream media could catch on, and this would be a great project to associate with Dr. Paul. Worst case scenario is that we help out a great cause.
Who can participate? Anyone! It's free to download, free to install, free to participate. They have versions for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even a special version that you can install on your Playstation 3!
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=96878
The competition: So far there are three other presidential candidate teams. Obama's is the only one currently beating us. It currently only has one person participating, but they are beating us since they had a head start. With enough users we could easily catch up and pass them.
What is Folding@Home? The best answer and a lot more information can be found at the http://folding.stanford.edu website, specifically the FAQ page. In short, the Folding@Home project is a non-profit research organization ran by the Standford University Chemistry Department. The goal of the project is to study protein folding and misfolding by using the computing power of hundreds of thousands of individually owned computers around the world.
How does it work? The Folding@Home project makes use of distributed computing. Distributed computing just means using thousands of computers to calculate small pieces of a large problem, instead of using one big supercomputer to calculate one giant problem. That still doesn’t explain how exactly it works. First people from around the world download and install (instructions in the next post) the Folding@Home software from the Stanford website. This software is what coordinates all of the hundreds of thousands of computers around the world so that they can work together. The once installed and running the software contacts the Stanford servers and requests work. The servers send your computer some calculations to run. Once finished your computer returns the results to Stanford for analysis and requests more work.
Why is it important? A very in depth description of why the study of protein folding is important can be found at: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science Aside from a better understanding of protein folding in general, one of the main goals of the project is the study of protein misfolding. Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. People believe that if we can better understand why proteins misfold, that it can be used to better understand these diseases and hopefully prevent them or find cures.
How does it help Ron Paul? It doesn’t directly, it directly helps the Folding@Home non-profit research project. That being said I have created a RonPaul2008 Folding@Home team, that all of us can join our computers to (instructions in the next post). The F@H project tracks statistics both on an individual as well as the team level. My hope would be that several thousand of us computer savvy Ron Paul supporters could join our computers and see how high we can get our ranking. Here is a list of the top 100 ranked teams: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats It would be very hard for us to get up that high, but we will definitely be the #1 team supporting a presidential candidate. And who knows if we get enough support the main stream media could catch on, and this would be a great project to associate with Dr. Paul. Worst case scenario is that we help out a great cause.
Who can participate? Anyone! It's free to download, free to install, free to participate. They have versions for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even a special version that you can install on your Playstation 3!
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I think our first goal should be to try to break the 10K mark.
