what is folding?

[babbaj]

can someone explain what folding is? i watched a youtube video about it and apparently it's for cancer research and apparently it's similar to bitcoin mining but I still don't know what it is.

 

there should have been a pinned thread for this

[Lord Pantaloons]

Folding is basically letting scientists and uni's borrow some of your PC's processing power to help them crunch numbers.

[T.Vengeance]

It's in the folding faq tbh.

 

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc2

 

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/the-science/

[BatterySound]

It's in the folding faq tbh.

 

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc2

 

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/the-science/

 

Why is it so big? Just charity or do you get something in return? Just stumbled upon this and I'm 13 so yea ELI13.

[Guest]

Why is it so big? Just charity or do you get something in return? Just stumbled upon this and I'm 13 so yea ELI13.

 

IIRC you don't get anything in return. You're helping those universities and institutes with cancer research, and that's exactly why it's so big. Cancer sucks, and people want to help out, even if it is just a little.

[Norwegiantweaker]

[tobben]

it's distributed computing, you are basically lending away your processing power to do something more useful with it than you most likely ever would, it's mostly about simulating proteins/particles among other things to try and find out how cells mutate, folding revolves around medial research. 

 

instead of having a single giant central solution with dedicated power grids strict air conditioning and whatnot, they break the workload into tiny tiny pieces and send it all over the world to people like us who are participating in the project, we churn through it and send the results back, all in the name of science and the greater good, the result is a network of computers rivaling or exceeding the processing power of massive super computers, we do actually have pinned threads for this, it doesn't explain in detail what it is but glances over it.

 

all you need to join is to download a program install it and run it.

[P e r s e p h o n e]

Basically protein research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

[Commander Llama]

Although the folding projects are fairly specialized, I contribute on the basis of:

 

A ) Cancer and Alzheimer's suck.

 

B ) Proteins are nature's nanomachines.  Once we fully understand them, we could do almost anything.  It makes me feel like I'm giving a small bit towards that eventual goal.