Let your computer help researchers!
Folding @ Home is free software from Stanford Univ. Download it, and your computer starts crunching numbers in the background, workiing on protein folding sequences.
This is distributed computing, which means that tens of thousands of computers are running the same program simultaneously, working on different data sets – which gives researchers access to computing power they could not get otherwise.
Folding @ Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously acheived. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.
My copy is happily running in the background, seems quite well-behaved, and while I’m sleeping, it’s working.