Does anyone partake in the Stanford University 'Folding@Home' Program? what are the benefits etc. as I've been asked to join a team, it's just a number but I have no idea what it is all about, to do with the power of putting thousands of computers together or something similar?!
Folding@home is a distributed computing program designed to fight diseases on earth. As you know, there are various ways to fight diseases, learning to know how proteins exactly fold, is one of them. Folding proteins is a very complex, tough and lengthy process for us to learn. For example, if I ask you to post 5 posts / day of DigitalPoint Forums, you would do that. But, what if I ask you to post 500 posts / day? Same thing is with our computers. Even though today's computers are really fast, they are not fast enough to process trillions of jobs at one go. Enter distributed computing, and this thing is made easier with millions of computers. Some popular projects include SETI@home, Rosetta@home, Distributed.net, etc. In simple words, it's e-charity. Put your idle CPU cycles to good use.