How fast is your computer? 1Ghz? 2? 3??? How busy is it? Not very I’ll bet. Computers have gotten radically faster since 1995 but they don’t really DO anything more than they did all those years ago. Why? Because Microsoft and Intel, Dell and IBM, Best Buy and Wal-Mart.. they all need to make money. Only a few applications even come close to taxing these machines and you probably aren’t using them. And if you are, probably not very much. Even a “power user” uses well less than 5% of a modern computer’s CPU time on average. That’s right skippy… 5%. So what? What can you do with that giant amount of power that is rotting away on your desk?

Well… If you’re smart you’ll fold protein. You see… there are good folks out there that are trying to cure cancer, aids, Alzheimer’s, ms and everything else. And they need your help.

Here’s the straight dope: The cures to these diseases lie in the molecular mysteries of how our bodies work. Protein folding involves a big giant computer trying to simulate these low-level biological processes. Once we can simulate them we can understand them and cure them when they go awry.

Here’s how you can help: You can start using all those wasted CPU cycles to cure disease. See, the big computer used in these simulations is actually a bazillion little volunteer computers acting as one. Each person’s computer does a little bit of the work on a really large problem, and huge problems actually become solvable. This is called “distributed computing” and it is a blessing born from the Internet, abundantly fast PC’s and some very smart engineers. The best part is it costs you nothing, you are donating tiny little slices of CPU time that you weren’t using anyway and will never miss. It’s like being able to instantly feed all of the starving people in the world with your leftovers.

How’s it work? Simple. Computers are funny neurotic little things. If they aren’t doing something every nanosecond of the day they go nuts. In order to keep them sane, we give them “dummy work” to keep them busy… we make them actively think about nothing. In Windows this dummy work is aptly named the System Idle Process. When your computer isn’t busy doing something for you, (99% of the time) it’s busily working away on nothing. The “Folding at Home” program replaces the dummy work with work that cures diseases. Replacing the dummy work ensures that you’ll never notice that your computer is being a hero. It only works on curing a disease when you are NOT working on it. You may think you use your computer a lot but believe me you don’t… one minute is an ETERNITY for a modern computer. I use mine pretty hard for about 15 hours every day and it still has lots of time to do it’s hero’s work.

Fold a protein, save a life. It might be just that simple. Remember kids, you may be a useless waste of space but your computer doesn’t have to be! =)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2003 @ 12:08 am on the category Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.