Re: The Prospective Team Member Guide

Quoting Trev

...If anyone can give me some answers on how a computer can find out info better than humans i will download it...

They don't find it "better", just much faster.

Suppose you wanted to find all the different combinations of cards you might get in a simple five card poker hand. You could figure it out on your own, but that might take you a while. A properly programmed computer could give you the answer almost instantaneously.

Folding at Home studies all the ways a protein can combine itself, much like the deal of a poker hand. The hitch is that there are quite a few more variables, meaning that it's a lot more complicated. Our computers run a simulation which mimics the way proteins Fold, then Stanford takes the data and analyzes it. Believe me, that part takes a lot of scientific human know-how.

The significance of computers in medical research is well documented. The catch here is that this program is so complex that even a supercomputer would take ages to gather all of the data required. The way we help is by using our personal computers to take on bite-sized chunks of the project, rapidly accelerating the process.

Are you a gamer? If so, ask yourself this: What kind of performance could you get if you had hundreds of thousands of computer processors and hundreds of thousands of video cards all working in an SLI type of setup? Pretty darn good, I'd say.