The Gamespot Folding team was originally started by [url=http://www.gamespot.com/users/thaddusbly/]thaddusbly[/url] some years ago when this site used the Lithium forums. Thankfully when the forums switched over to the existing software [url=http://www.gamespot.com/users/Dark_Jedi/]Dark_Jedi[/url] saved the main post and re-stickied what we have here today. Under the watchful eyes of [url=http://www.gamespot.com/users/Konrad/]Konrad[/url] & [url=http://www.gamespot.com/users/nutDAVE3]nutDAVE3[/url] 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 [url=http://www.gamespot.com/users/DirkVDV01/]DirkVD01[/url] 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 [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing]distributed computing[/url] program called [url=http://folding.stanford.edu/]Folding@home[/url] 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 [url=http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html]HERE[/url]. 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 [url=http://folding.stanford.edu/science.html]THIS[/url].

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: [url=http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=32721]#32721[/url]

Hey DJ, a few of those links from the original post don't work anymore and 1 goes to a nice pron site ;) If you get a chance I looked around and found replacement links so maybe you can update them:

This is to view team stats:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=32721

Link to more interactive stats page:
http://www.statsman.ww-testsites.co.uk/folding2stats/

An excellant link to check out team progress:
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=32721

One other link that might be good to add is a MaximumPC magazine article on setting up the client(s) on your computer: http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2003-06-10.html

We aren't doing to bad either after all this time, we are ranked 144 out of 30680 other teams :)