Fremont, California, January 28th, 2003-ABIT
has started a Folding@Home team and invites you to join! Anybody who wants to
contribute their work units toward our team should enter the ABIT number in
their client configuration. The ABIT Team number is: 13285. To set
it up, after you have downloaded the client, right click on the F@H icon in the
system tray and choose "Configure…" In the User Name section put your name or
whatever name you like, then in the "Team Number:" section put the ABIT team
number of: 13285. To make sure you are participating in the Folding project go
to the Advanced tab and at the bottom, under "client type" and choose;
"Folding@Home".
Biology's Most Complex Problem--From Genome to Structure
Now that we have a map of the human genome what we really need to know is not
only which genes code for which proteins but how those proteins are made. Now
the biggest challenge is to solve what is probably biology's most complex
problem -- how proteins fold. As one of the most pervasive and important
elements in nature, proteins have a rather unique way of coming into being, they
make themselves. This process is called "folding" and how it happens can tell us
a lot about their functions. It is a process that is not understood and
mastering this mysterious force has been a sort of "Holy Grail" among
scientists.
Lets All Get Together Now
To accomplish this task a team at the University of California at Stanford has
created a distributed computing program that aims to harness the collective
computing power of all those idle computers. Based on the SETI@home model, the
team, using the
Fold@Home computer program, hopes to break the "microsecond barrier".
The What?
First of all, you have to completely rethink your idea of "fast". Not only is
the fact that proteins assemble themselves special, but it is that they do it at
such a tremendous speed, some of them as quickly as a millionth of a second. And
the website explains that while this is indeed fast for you and me, "it's
remarkably long for computers to simulate. In fact there is a 1000 fold gap
between the simulation timescales (nanoseconds) and the times at which the
fastest proteins fold (microseconds)".
Each step of the folding process is incredibly complex, Dr. Vijay Pande,
assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford University and principal
investigator of the project, explains; "There are so many variables and
calculations to be done in the space of nanoseconds that the PC simply can't
keep up".
Using the distributed computing model the Stanford team hopes to simulate
protein folding in order to understand how proteins fold so quickly and
reliably. According to Pande, "Once you know what the shape is, you can guess
at what it does. Their structure tells us a lot of what they do and how they put
themselves together".
A Solution: DISTRIBUTED DYNAMICS
To solve the protein folding problem, their group has developed a new way to
simulate protein folding which can break the microsecond barrier by dividing the
work between multiple processors in a new way -- with a near linear speed up in
the number of processors. Thus, with 1000 processors, they can break the
microsecond barrier and unlock the
mystery of how
proteins fold.
As reported by a Wired magazine article, simple proteins assemble in about
10,000 nanoseconds, and one 400MHz computer can simulate 1 nanosecond of
assembly time in about a day, Pande said. This means 1,000 participants would be
needed to simulate a simple protein fold in 10 days, and that's just for simple
folds. More complex proteins can take far longer.
As the Stanford team explains on their website; "this method is extremely
computationally demanding and we need your
help."
Who Benefits?
We all do! Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by
an academic institution, the
Pande Group, at Stanford University's
Chemistry Department. They
have put movies and images of all folding runs on the web (Check
out the current results here). These are updated daily, and include
information about which users contributed to that run.
Here is where you go and find out more and download the program:
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html
It's free and it is very small, runs in the background and never takes resources
when they are needed by something else. You just let it run and forget about it!
Anybody who wants to contribute their work units toward our team should enter
the ABIT number in their client configuration. The ABIT Team number is: 13285.
To set it up, after you have downloaded the client, right click on the F@H icon
in the system tray and choose "Configure...". In the User Name section put your
name or whatever name you like, then in the "Team Number:" section put the ABIT
team number of: 13285. To make sure you are participating in the Folding
project go to the Advanced tab and at the bottom, under "client type", choose;
"Folding@Home".
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mainboards and multimedia products that support industry-leading technology and
provide leading quality and performance for system integration of computer
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