Thoughts from the abyss

Most of the time your PC’s just sit idle, bored, and doing mostly nothing at all. With systems so fast these days, that’s just about what happens most of the time, especially for the usual desktop sitting at home. After sitting awhile, I’m sure you have a screensaver set up to kick on. After that, your PC has a little something to process graphically, plus it keeps your screens from buring out.

A friend and I used to be part of SETI@Home, Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence distributed computing program, but the program is unfortunately starting to dry up due to lack of funding. If you don’t know what distributed computing is, basically it’s organizations using the millions of idle CPU’s sitting around to process “work units” to help study a particular cause. In the case of SETI, Berkeley was analyzing radio telescope data. Like my friend best said, “it’s not that I’m interesting in finding ET, it’s the distributed processing power that I find interesting.” Just like my partner in crime, I find it fascinating that millions of computers around the world can uniformly be put to a good use.

Now, back to Folding@Home. Folding@Home uses free CPU cycles the same was SETI does, by installing a simple client on your PC, downloading a work unit, process the results, and then upload the results back for computation, and then a score is awarded to you in the form of points. Instead of looking for little green men flying around, however, Folding@Home processes data to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and how they might relate to diseases, such as cancer.

Since SETI is starting to shutdown, my buddy and I decided to take the plunge to move over to the new Folding@Home project. Being part of the CentOS list (my favorite Linux OS), the maintaner posted an e-mail asking those that use CentOS to start “Folding” and join the CentOS team. Personally, I like the new project better than the old for the simple fact that it’s helping scientists possibly understand diseases and how they form and/or interact.

If you’re interested visit the link above. Folding@Home is sponsored by Stanford University, and there are easy installers for both Windows and Linux. You can choose to register as anonymous, with a username so your name appears on the stat pages, or you can create your own team to collect as many points and stats as you can as a whole. If you’re using your machines for very productive work, I advise testing the client out prior to unleashing it on a ton of CPU’s though, just in case it would affect any projects that you might have going on. It’s for a good cause, so check it out, plus it’s fun to “compete” in a way.