Need something for your computer to do while our brave Senators pull an all-nighter for the troops and the American People? Well, I've got just the thing for you.
About 100 of us intrepid Kossacks have been a part of the DailyKos Folding@Home distributed computing team for over a year now, trying to catch up with the nutcases over at FreeRepublic--but we need more help!
Currently the Freeper team is ranked #56 out of 73,609 teams in terms of work units processed; our own Daily Kos team is only ranked #365.
And there's no way that should be happening. We're bigger, better and smarter than they are. And they hate science, for crying out loud!
Now, I know some of you are asking yourselves, "What The Heck Is Folding@Home?" I'm SO glad you asked!
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project (much like SETI@Home) run by Stanford University--read all about it at the link above. Basically, the project is about harnessing the power of individual idle PC's to create a giant supercomputer capable of simulating the folding processes of the proteins that DNA sequences code for. This will help us better understand the way molecular biology functions, and also help understand the causes of various diseases--such as Creuzfeld-Jakob, Alzheimer's, etc.--that have to do with misfolding of proteins.
How it works: Individual computer users can download the client program in whatever format they need, and configure it to their specifications. What the client does is connect to the main server and download a "work unit" for the individual processor to analyze. When the "work unit" is completed, the PC sends the analyzed data back to the central server--one more protein folding permutation has been analyzed and sent for processing!
And the best part is that you can tell the program how much of your computer's resources you want it to use: so if you have a speedy machine, you can tell it to use 50% when active, and 90% when idle; if you run a slower rig, you can have it run at 5% and not notice any performance degradation.
Users have the capability to join teams. They way they do this is by selecting the "configure" option once they've downloaded and installed the program. So come join the Daily Kos team by configuring your client with TEAM NUMBER 48083--that's the Daily Kos team number.
It's totally safe and bug free, and you can run it even if you already run SETI@Home.
So please, while you're watching those Senators on C-SPAN, come on in and Join the Team--AND KICK SOME FREEPER BUTT FOR THE GOOD OF SCIENCE!
[N.B.: I post this diary every threeof months or so in the hopes that more people will see it and join up; I know that some of you have joined, but forget to turn your applications on. The distributed computing community is large and rather progressive, and they take note of the biggest, baddest teams out there. With over 120,000 registered users, there is no reason why at 400 of us can't join in on this project and make waves yet again on behalf of the progressive blogosphere...]