| Folding@Rose |
|
by Mike Jones Folding@Home is a program developed by Stanford University that collects data on protein folding by harnessing all the computing power that people don’t use to help learn how to prevent diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. The program can be downloaded for free from the project webpage (folding.stanford.edu), runs on almost any kind of computer (as well as the PlayStation 3), and even keeps track of how much work a user who registers has helped complete. More specifically, Folding@Home tries to figure out how the proteins in our body work. Proteins are made of a bunch of pieces that get put together in a giant chain, which gets folded into something resembling a tangled ball. If this ball gets tangled the wrong way, we get problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s. All of this requires very precise measurement that can be more efficiently done by computers rather than humans. Folding@Home wants to get as close as possible to the correct measurements, which takes considerable computing power. Your computer can probably carry out millions of operations for second, whereas you might be able to only do a dozen things per second. “Work units”, as they’re called by the program, take between several hours and several days to complete. Clearly, to cover the expansive number of possible protein combinations would require an equally expansive amount of time with only a few computers. Then the researchers who started the project had a great idea; the more computers calculating, the less time things would take. Most computers are only used for simple operations like browsing the web and spend a lot of time doing nothing. By distributing the work needed to be completed across the internet to take advantage of these wasted resources, a massive parallel computation environment can process more work units than just the Stanford lab computers in the same amount of time. So how does this relate to Rose-Hulman? The Rose-Hulman CSSE department runs the program on computers in the labs, taking the unused power that would otherwise be wasted and putting it to good use. The department so far has been producing about 14 thousand work unit points per day. The machines work around the clock, and Folding@Home is set up so that work is only done if there is nothing else that needs the resources it otherwise takes up. To put this in perspective, the largest work units take a desktop computer about a day to finish. This unit, when complete, is worth about 2000 points. The CSSE department completes 7 of this size work unit every single day, completing a massive amount of research. If you’re interested in helping out, check out the RHIT Folding@Home team. Our team number at the project webpage is 31658. |