Omnimaga
General Discussion => Technology and Development => Other => Topic started by: flyingfisch on January 04, 2012, 03:09:21 pm
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I have heard people mention folding@home on the forums and I have no idea what it is. Could someone enlighten me?
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It's a project to figure out how proteins folds themselves, they run simulations of folding proteins on every computer running Folding@home. So your computer could donate its spare CPU/GPU time to research.
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So do they use your computer remotely?
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So do they use your computer remotely?
No, nothing of the sort. They send your computer problems that would normally take a lot of power to do together, but have been reduced and sent to your computer. For example, they may not ask to fold an entire protein, but only a very very small part of it. They send your computer work, your computer does it, and returns the output. It should be safe, and I can pretty much guarantee transactions with folding@home are going to be encrypted in some way if they are important. Its fine, and safe to use if you want to try it.
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No, they just send you proteins to fold, you fold them and you send them back folded.
Edit: waah ninja'd :o
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Hmm... A little off-topic, but isn't there some college who is doing tests to analyze data collected from space and who is using some kind of method like this? Where you download a program, and it receives data, works on it, then sends it back?
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SETI@home?
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Yes, most likely SETI, which is done by berkeley, I believe. I don't remember, because BOINC is what most of the @home projects use, and it is good for distributed computing, and it is also done by berkeley.
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The same type of distributed computing project was used to factor all of TI's 512-bit RSA keys for signing Flash applications and operating systems. Many of us in the community at the time directly contributed to it, and even some outside of it, which was very exciting.