Calling All Gamers – Fold@Home With Us

Those of you that have never heard what folding@home is let me bring you up to speed. Folding@home is a distributed computing project where people from all around the world can download a small file and create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer is used to fold proteins which if folded incorrectly can cause diseases such as Alzheimers, HLS, Huntington and many types of Cancer. By downloading the folding@home client you can help further research into finding cures for these terrible diseases by having your own computer fold these proteins.

So now that you know that folding@home can cure diseases, some which you or your children may have one day, why not fold@home with me? You can set it up to only fold when you want it to; you can save your progress and continue at another time and those of you out there that are computer gamers should not notice any difference when you are folding and just doing light computer work like checking email or checking your facebook. Because of this you could fold proteins whenever your computer is on and you aren’t playing games. Whenever I have my desktop on I’m folding proteins, I only stop it when I decide to pay StarCraft II, and even then I could continue to fold proteins, however I’d probably have to play on the game on a lower graphics setting.

Why should gamer’s fold@home though? If curing diseases isn’t enough for you then I have another proposition for you. The way newer graphics cards are made, they actually have more power than your actual processor, or at least for folding proteins they are better suited. The reason why is because some graphics cards have hundreds of processing cores instead of just 1 – 6 like our CPUs today have. I currently fold with my nVidia 9800GT and it does a fantastic job, and my graphics card is by no mean on the bleeding edge of technology.

Console gamers don’t think you can get away so easy. If you own a PS3 you can also fold@home and you should. You can do this by going to “Life with PlayStation” and you can set up your PS3 to do nothing but fold proteins. This is what I have also done and I will leave my PS3 on for half of the day just folding proteins. Those of you worried about the electricity bill from what I’ve heard from others who leave their PS3 on 24/7 is that it only runs their bill up $10 extra each month. So just doing 12 hours a day would be $5 a month, not a bad price to pay for helping to cure diseases.

Are you ready to start folding? You can download the client here if you want something that isn’t fancy. If you have a good graphics card I recommend downloading this one. I would also like to invite you to fold proteins on the VideoGameBlogger team where we compete with every other team out there to hopefully fold more than anyone else. Our team number is: 192051.