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Service Learning
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Folding@Home is a distributed computing project, run by a Stanford University research group, which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases.
The Problem: Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.
It's amazing that not only do proteins self-assemble -- fold -- but they do so amazingly quickly: some as fast as a millionth of a second. While this time is very fast on a person's timescale, it's remarkably long for computers to simulate. In fact, it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, using only one computer, it would take 10,000 days (30 years) to simulate folding. That's a long time to wait for one result!
The Solution: The Folding@Home project uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed them to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct their approach to examine folding related diseases.
Since October 1, 2000, over 500,000 computers throughout the world have participated in Folding@Home. Each additional computer gives an added boost in performance, allowing the research group to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing problems faster or more accurately.
Our Contribution: Woodlawn has joined in this effort by configuring several of its computers to run the Folding@Home software. This permits the computers to work on specific protein folding simulations during their idle time (especially nights and weekends), and then forward the results back to Stanford. Through our participation, students are part of a worldwide scientific research community working to find the cure for diseases like Alzheimer's - a disease they are especially interested in due to our service learning connection with The Haven, a local residence for people with Alzheimer's. They are also learning about polymers, molecular modeling, distributed computing, and computational methods in science.
You can participate: If you'd like to participate with us in this project, it's fairly easy. Go to the Folding@Home website and download the appropriate software for your computer. When you first run the software, you can configure it with your own name and with a team number (Woodlawn's team number is 34498). That's all you need to do - your computer will use its idle cycles to work on whatever folding simulation that the research group assigns to it.
Update: As of May, 2004, the Woodlawn team had completed 526 work units as part of this research project. It was ranked #1314 out of more than 30,000 active teams worldwide.
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