This is a pretty cool distributed computing project

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I thought that SETI@home was an interesting application, but this seems a lot more useful to me. I may set it up to run on my file server, which has a 64-bit AMD CPU that's idle much of the time. It will help justify the electricity costs to run it.

There is also the "Rosetta@home" project, run out of the University of Washington. It is developing the computational methods to translate the amino acid sequence into the finalized protein structure. It doesn't care about calculating the folding mechanics -- just the final result.

Small note about Folding@home -- they recently reported linking the GPU's of (IIRC) Playstation 3 to create a 1 petaflop cluster.

If that isn't a marketing pitch by the kids to get a current gamebox, I don't know what would.

I met some people who were working on the protein folding problem, back in 1986-87. Boy am I glad I'm not in that field. Can you imagine spending your whole career on the same problem, and it still isn't solved?

I'm pretty sure Folding using BOINC, just like seti@home does now. Once you have a BOINC client set up, you can participate in a bunch of cool projects. Climate models, gravity wave detector data (einstein@home I think), there was one helping to design detectors for LHC, and I think they are going to process LHC data with one too. There's also a development project called orbit@home which is going to work the NEO problem. wikipedia has good info.

I run BOINC, and hadn't heard of orbit@home. Just tried to sign up, but no dice.

At one point I was ranked fairly high on SETI@home. I had a dual p3 600MHz machine that could crank out 2 projects a day. It beat the pants off my P4 1.8GHz machine that I mostly used for gaming at the time which could do a project in about 2 1/2 days. Point being, if you get a dual core processor then your project times go down significantly.