PCLinuxOS Folding Team

by Linuxera

I thought I would make a contribution by sharing some information about a not so very well known part of the PCLinuxOS community, The Folding Team.

What is the folding team, you ask? Well, it's a group of community members that are allowing their computers to be used by Stanford University instead of Stanford having to buy one large super computer. Each member downloads a small Linux application that runs from a terminal. A little program is run inside the terminal that does mathematical calculations all day and night, or for as long as the CPU is alive and kicking. What these mathematical calculations represent are the folding and unfolding of proteins in the human body. Research is being carried out on the computer while you are busy doing whatever task you enjoy without you ever being interrupted or slowed down, since the folding project uses only what spare CPU power is available. I joined the team some time after getting acquainted with PCLinuxOS. I was, and still am awed at what our team is doing. Let me share with you a bit about it.

To quote directly from the informational page at Stanford University's site: "The Folding@home project (FAH) is dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases that result from protein misfolding and aggregation, and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general. Here, we briefly describe our goals, what we are doing, and some highlights so far. We feel strongly that a Distributed Computing project must not just run calculations on millions of PC's, but DC projects must produce results, especially in the form of peer reviewed publications, public lectures, and other ways to disseminate the results from FAH to the greater scientific community." The PCLinuxOS Team is currently (As of 26 April 2010) in 157th place out of 179,774 teams that are folding for Stanford University. That in itself is an accomplishment. They have completed 118,877 units of work successfully since starting.

The team only has 19 active members at the moment, but they are still producing an awesome quantity of units daily.

Over at Overclockers, they are kicking some serious hiney as well, as you can see in this next image. Notice on the same day (26 April 2010), the team was in 155th place and had just moved up a notch in the last 7 days. Woot!! Go Team.