About two years ago, when starting my previous job running the computer resource at the University College for the Creative Arts I heard about Folding at Home (F@H). It’s a Stanford University project, in a nut shell, researching folding of proteins and how, when miss folding, they cause diseases such as different cancers and alzheimer’s. There’s couple of different ways to run F@H; in a stand alone app, screen saver or from command line. I chose to use the screen saver as it needed least effort from my part in terms of keeping it running. Just leave it to start as the machine is not in use. I’t’s a brilliant way of participating in research, using those empty processor cycles for something useful.
Of course, I’ve since left college and moved on to the other side. But I did leave the screen saver on all the machines I was administering, 55 G5’s. It wasn’t running 24/7 for two years, sometimes the machines were shutdown for nights and weekends, sometimes students might have changed the screen saver etc. But now finally it has reached 1.000.000 points. Thanks for this belongs, obviously, to UCCA and that they’ve allowed it to keep running.
If you want to know more about Folding at Home, read this article about the science behind it. If you want learn more about distributed computing here’s the wikipedia article and another one on Xgrid, which is a build in technology in Mac OS for distributed computing.
–kristian
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