Folding @ Home - Would you consider folding?

Do you leave your machines on all the time? Are most of your CPU cycles going to polling? If so you are like millions of other users around the world. I think there is some very important work you can help with just by leaving your machine on and donating your CPU cycles (some electricity too) to medical science. The cause I support is called Folding@Home, pronounced Folding At Home.

Me and about 350,000 other people around the world run protein folding simulations to fight diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's Disease (formerly Chorea), Malaria, Cancer, and many more. All the data is collected by Stanford University, one of the premier medical research universities in the world (just in case you didn't already know that).

I have a warm spot in my heart for Stanford University and Medical Center. This is where my mom made her last stand against leukemia. They worked hard and always did so with compassion. Perhaps the work the Folding team is doing now will save your mum one day.

I am asking you to help them by running one their folding programs on your computer. Since you are probably more advanced than the average users (your reading this blog aren't you?) please consider running one of their SMP, or better still, a GPU client. (I run both at the same time.) The graphics processors in many video cards today are really nothing more the parallel processing number crunchers. Exactly what protein folding simulations need. The have clients for Windows, Linux, Intel-Mac, and even PS3.

Please go to http://folding.standford.edu for more information. I'm proud of my work for them; you'll feel great too. Feel free to join my team (165452, Sparkyz World Gives Back Folding Team) or one of the other thousands of teams. Create your own!

Thanks for reading this. Now back to the nerding!

PS I run my nVidia graphics card at 99%, my six core CPU and 100%, I jam VMware Workstation all day, and keep it all running smoothly with a little help from Process Lasso. An awesome little app from from a small company called Bitsum Technolgies. (Not a paid advert; just a thumbs up to a friend.)