hi i want to do this because everbody is but what is it exactly? do i need a really badass computer for it not to crash or overheat thats what i herd thanks
You're obviously not in biochemistry, chemistry or any biological field so you obviously don't understand the futility of studying protein folding which can only be fixed through genetic screening. The F@H project itself is costing millions a year.
For the most part, cancer research is also a waste of money; the job of cancer oncologists is to tell people they die. At best they spend a large proportion of your tax dollars to extend their life a few months. That's not even getting into quality of life. Every cancer drug in use today has come from industry; no cancer drugs have come from academia.
Half of all healthcare costs are spent in the last 6 months of life. That's 3% of the economy.
GPS was not an invention of NASA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
NASA used to cost 4% of the budget in the 60s, the accumulated cost has been trillions in today's dollars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
Even if it's less than 0.5% of the budget that's billions of dollars wasted.
The final cost of the first Apollo project is over $100 million in today's dollars. That's not nearly the most expensive Apollo project either...
Every year NASA overruns it's budget by %200-300n
Like I said for the trillions of dollars put into NASA we could have gotten much more than the microwave and some tire treads. Now they are studying Mars. It will never be feasible to colonize Mars or any other planet. Yet none of these dollars we shovel them is pushed towards asteroids prevention.
It may not cost you anything directly but just supporting them means they will continue to get funding from the government.
"Most notably, a large bulk of our funding comes from the United States' National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). We also thank (in alphabetical order) Apple, ATI, Dell, Google, Intel, and Sony for their support over the years. Finally, we have been supported by NIH Roadmap centers Simbios and the Protein Folding Nanomedicine Center. " From their website. The NIH and NSF dollars are from your pockets.
Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness,[2] and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.[3] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[4]
Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases.[5] More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 1.5 millisecond range[6] — which is a simulation thousands of times longer than it was previously thought possible to model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@Home
Yes, because the modeling you can do on a single computer in your computer lab is comparable in usefulness (or anything else, really) to the modeling that can be done with a 10 petaflop array.Again, better understanding doesn't mean better treatment or cure; I said this in the previous post. In fact none of those diseases have any form of care and nothing on the horizon.
We have a molecular modeling computer that sits next me in the computer lab; I know how protein modeling works, apparently you guys don't.
almost like torrents.. when your done downloading a person normally leaves it connected where you are part of the file sharing network