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posted by janrinok on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the let's-hear-it-for-the-team dept.

[Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that takes advantage of otherwise idle computing resources on volunteer's computers to simulate how proteins fold and thus guide progress to finding a cure to diseases such as: Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers. --martyb]

Back in February of this year, one of our site's members Sir Finkus introduced our community to Folding@Home with this story:

I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for SoylentNews. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here , which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

We are pleased to announce that our SoylentNews Folding@Home team is now approaching the top 500 spot! Our team size has plateaued, but new members are welcome at any time. To put this milestone in perspective, since the time when the team started in mid-Februrary of this year, we have overtaken 229,814 teams!

We even have a channel, #folding, on IRC.

Official Stats:
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/teamstats/team230319.html
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319

Better Stats at:
Team Summary
Teams Overall Rank
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 501-600
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 499-500

Related Coverage:
Soylent News has a Top 1000 Folding@Home Team!
Huntington's Disease: University of Toronto Researcher is First to Share Lab Notes in Real Time


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @06:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @06:39PM (#391145)

    Is it possible to read this as "SOYLENT has reached the top 500 of CO2 polluters in TEH WORLD?"

    If everyone's computer went into standby instead of running this program, how many lives would be saved?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:21PM (#391166)

    Only if you assume that everyone's power is generated in a manner that produces greenhouse gasses. What if you are solar powered, or in an area that has a hydroelectric source, or even a geothermal source.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:58PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:58PM (#391192)

      Let's get some stats on that - % of Team Soylent on green power.

      While you're at it, let's consider how much of that green power could have been used to reduce polluting power if it hadn't been burned in Folding At Home.

      Then, let's all take a step back and look at "real industry" and see just how insignificant this whole Folding At Home endeavor is to the CO2 situation as compared to something like a Steel forging operation.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:28PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:28PM (#391172) Journal

    No extra CO2 here. I've just made my kids all hold their breath, so it's just a simple tradeoff.

    • (Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:41PM

      by ticho (89) on Sunday August 21 2016, @07:41PM (#391180) Homepage Journal

      There's an added benefit that they're much less noisy. Kudos! :)

  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:42PM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:42PM (#391213) Journal

    lives lost due to air pollution and coal mining, vs. lives to be saved by Folding-related medical research.

    Maybe you can get a grant to conduct this study and find out which will be higher.

    Computers also generate "free" heat, so anybody who was going to use electric heat anyway doesn't have much to lose.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 21 2016, @10:19PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Sunday August 21 2016, @10:19PM (#391277)

    I live in a country that produces almost 100% of it's power with geothermal and hydro electricity, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over CO2 production.