Craig Mayhew’s Blog

About a year ago I got my hands on a PS3 for the sole purpose of running folding@home. When people discovered I had a PS3 with no games they thought me slightly mad. When I explained to them it was just for running folding@home I was greeted by blank faces and questions such as “what the hell is that?”. Hopefully a few people will read this post and find out a bit more about f@h and how it could help research into new drugs and therapies that will save lives.

What is folding@home?

Folding@Home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. People donate a their unused processing power from their home/work computers. It’s as simple as downloading a piece of software from the folding@home website and then leaving it to run in the background. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed within Stanford University’s chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@Home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world. The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.” In short it’s trying to better understand and hopefully lead to cures for sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases.

Why should I help?

Because people die from cancer and other aggregation-related diseases every single minute. Or if your just after the feel good factor of saying “look I’ve donated” then you get a score that keeps tally of how much processing power you have donated. This is visible on the scoreboard here.

Where do I get it?

If you want to install it on a desktop computer then it’s available here. If you own a PS3 then all you need to do is hook it up to the internet, download the latest updates and then goto the f@h icon (under the network icon) to leave it running. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to run f@h in the background on a PS3. If your quite tech savvy then it’s even possible to download and run f@h for your ati graphics card.

What have you done Craig?

At the time of writing this I’m in 5 881st position out of the 957 729 people that have donated. With my total score being 423 287. Here’s a link to my f@h profile and my teams profile.

They also give you a certificate to display in your office :)