The Gamespot Folding team was originally started by thaddusbly some years ago when this site used the Lithium forums. Thankfully when the forums switched over to the existing software Dark_Jedi saved the main post and re-stickied what we have here today. Under the watchful eyes of Konrad & nutDAVE3 it had remained stickied.
While I am at it I'd like to thank everyone who contributes to this team effort by donating their unused processor cycles and as well as posting and helping out in this very thread. I'd also like to thank DirkVD01 for helping me out with the updates.
So what's the actual purpose of the Gamespot folding team? Well it's not about folding laundry :) Stanford University runs a distributed computing program called Folding@home and its goal is to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. That last part, related diseases is what this is really all about; it's what nearly 2,000,000 processors are doing and that is helping to find cures to these forms of cancer:
In addition to the links above you can read up (if so incline) on the published research papers that are a direct result of the various folding teams. Currently there are 45 and they can be read HERE. The papers are of public domain and not something that was sold off for profit. For more information on the scientific literature and what exactly protein folding and misfoling is see THIS.
How does the Gamespot Folding team work? Basically you download a small program or client that once installed will utilize your processor's 'unused' cycles to work on folding. Unused cycles? Simply put it is the portion of you processor that isn't doing any work, so if it's running at 80% while you game the other 20% goes to folding. It does this on the fly and will not interfere with your gaming or other computer usage. You can download clients that run either in the background or clients that run as screen savers.
What are the requirements to run it? Whatever processor you use needs to be able to complete the work units on time which can usually be done on a processor running at 1GHz or faster. These are the various operating systems you can run it on and the client downloads:
The Gamespot Folding Team Is:#32721
Production History
Radar Scope
Active & New Member Daily History
Future updates: Inclusion of charts, setup guides and more info on PS3 folding.
This thread is currently maintained by Krall with the last updates being done one 3/18/07
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