Have you ever wished there was some easy way you could put your computer's spare processing power to good use? Thanks to Stanford University, you can!
Folding@Home is a program that simulates how protein molecules fold together. This is an important thing to study because, according to the Folding@Home website, "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." After each simulation (which takes a few hours), the program uploads the results of its simulations to the project's main computers, which then process the findings. Using a distributed computer network like this lets the researchers get better results than they could with only a few supercomputers, and, in fact, Folding@Home may be one of the fastest distributed supercomputers in the world.
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