I don’t claim to be a scientist, nor do I think I will ever cure cancer… But I like to believe I am helping out in one way or another. If you feel the same way and if you have oodles of spare CPU power just sitting around doing nothing, why not put it to good use? Folding@home has been around for as long as I can remember. It basically takes any idle processing power from your machine and uses it to perform complex evaluation of data. There are many different ‘folding’ projects such as Rosetta and SETI. The folding applications work by downloading data sets from the projects servers, performing the calculations on the data and then uploading the results.

If you are wondering how you would make a difference to the project, well if you can imagine the amount of data that’s been collected from countless years of medical research. Now imagine just how much processing time this data is going to need.. Now – if you think there are billions of computers out there, that often have nothing to do……

Folding projects generally have hundreds of members, crunching the data for them which is obviously dramatically decreasing the length of time to completion on the folding process.

I have been folding data now for many years, however my processing has always been hampered by the lack of processing power available to me. I used to fold data from the SETI project, but since getting my mac I have moved to Rosetta. You can read more about Rosetta’s research on the projects website.

If you are interested in joining the folding community you may want to check out the system requirements, and once you are happy – download the folding client BOINC

I chose not to fold for any particular team, and instead set up a team for myself. I currently don’t have many PC’s folding for my team but I aim to change this. So if you want to help the Rosetta project, and join my team you can find details here