2008 Woodie Awards
Tech Talk: You and your computer can power cancer research
Zachary Leahan
Issue date: 10/3/07 Section: Features
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Gamers can help fight cancer. Really.
We Hawks want to help fight diseases anyway we can. The traditional way to help is to give money, which is tough since students don't have any.
A Stanford research project called "Folding@Home" allows students to help out in other ways. A concept called "Distributed Computing" allows us to offer our computers' processing power to Stanford's medical projects.
Instead of Stanford's research relying solely on the processing power of their computers, they dole out processing jobs to anyone who wants to donate processing power to help the project. Distributed computing creates a supercomputer.
In an online statement, Stanford explains, "Each additional CPU gives us an added boost in performance, allowing us to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing research faster or more accurately."
This project is called "Folding@Home" since it studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Simply put, when proteins misfold, there are serious complications that lead to disease. The project offers a small client program that runs in the background of your computer.
The setup process takes about five minutes. The client computer automatically receives "work units," processes them, and sends the results to Stanford. The non-profit group analyzes the results, and findings are submitted to scientific journals for publication.
The program is best for fast computers that are left on 24/7. I only suggest this program for desktop computers and Playstation 3s.
A laptop is not ideal for "Folding@Home" as a laptop's processor is built for power efficiency, not raw power. The program kicks in during idle processing time and will drain batteries. PS3s are great for "Folding@Home" since they can run 24/7 with no problems and are extremely fast and efficient.
Consider running this program on your parents' desktop at home, especially if they leave the computer on all the time anyway. The program uses idle processing power so your parents will have no performance issues. The program is also simple to uninstall.
We Hawks want to help fight diseases anyway we can. The traditional way to help is to give money, which is tough since students don't have any.
A Stanford research project called "Folding@Home" allows students to help out in other ways. A concept called "Distributed Computing" allows us to offer our computers' processing power to Stanford's medical projects.
Instead of Stanford's research relying solely on the processing power of their computers, they dole out processing jobs to anyone who wants to donate processing power to help the project. Distributed computing creates a supercomputer.
In an online statement, Stanford explains, "Each additional CPU gives us an added boost in performance, allowing us to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing research faster or more accurately."
This project is called "Folding@Home" since it studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Simply put, when proteins misfold, there are serious complications that lead to disease. The project offers a small client program that runs in the background of your computer.
The setup process takes about five minutes. The client computer automatically receives "work units," processes them, and sends the results to Stanford. The non-profit group analyzes the results, and findings are submitted to scientific journals for publication.
The program is best for fast computers that are left on 24/7. I only suggest this program for desktop computers and Playstation 3s.
A laptop is not ideal for "Folding@Home" as a laptop's processor is built for power efficiency, not raw power. The program kicks in during idle processing time and will drain batteries. PS3s are great for "Folding@Home" since they can run 24/7 with no problems and are extremely fast and efficient.
Consider running this program on your parents' desktop at home, especially if they leave the computer on all the time anyway. The program uses idle processing power so your parents will have no performance issues. The program is also simple to uninstall.
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