Distributed computing is the ingenious free super-computer rivalling processing power derived from idling computers while we’re off making tea or ‘revising’ in a housemate’s room. Projects put to distributed computing include SETI@Home (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Einstein@Home seeking to directly observe a gravitational wave, but these projects all pale in comparison to Folding@Home.

Folding@Home was set up by Stanford University’s chemistry department, who were without the enormous funding to buy a supercomputer of their own but needed huge processing power to work out exactly how different proteins fold. In the human body, polypeptides fold into precise 3-D shapes essential to their function in microseconds with incredible reliability, when they do fail in their intricate task it can lead to several degenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, various cancers and a number of others. It can take a home computer a couple of days to accurately fold just one protein, but with over 400,000 CPUs regularly returning units of information and several respected peer reviewed journals publishing results it is doing more and more good as new users join the online community and the power of the latest chips available increases as the public upgrade their hardware. The processing power of the F@H has long since eclipsed all the world’s supercomputers currently running at all times at over 4.5 PETAflops (the same as 450 thousand billion calculators and 3 times above the world’s fastest supercomputer, Roadrunner, working at 1.46PETAflops, a paltry 146 thousand billion calculators).

Several questions always come up when you try to explain this international project, which has run since 2000 and states its mission as, "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases." Trying to convince people to install a program which activates when your computer isn’t busy being used for work, gaming, watching DVDs, or surfing often prompts a bitter story about a virus. I know, I’ve had my own, they’re expensive to fix, annoying, and the thought of losing your files, photos, and music is nothing short of terrifying. Is it safe to install something which sounds so much like spyware it’s untrue? In the case of Folding@Home? Yes. It transfers information in discrete ‘packets’, and as long as you don’t change the settings from the low priority it starts on, it will always let you get on with what you need to do.

Sony have worked to involve their central cell processor in the Playstation 3 (out-folding normal PC CPUs by 20 to 1) and show off the graphics capability of this seventh generation console by rendering the attempts to correctly fold huge proteins over the course of an 8 hour work unit in real time. Unfortunately, only 30,000 PS3s out of a possible 2 Million which the folding network could handle are so far being put to use. PS3s and modern PC graphics cards are designed to handle complex algorithms and are the most useful additions to distributed computation.

So, if you’ve got 5 minutes between revision (I’m sure you deserve a break) then take a look, install it, and even if you just leave the program running and never check it again, feel safe in the knowledge that you’re donating your idling time to something worthwhile. If you’ve got more time to spare, some computing students feeling in need of a challenge have built ‘folding farms’, computers dedicated to folding as much as possible to advance you or your team on the online scoreboard. Each packet you return earns you points based on the promptness of return and the difficulty/size of the protein. Almost every student at this university owns a computer, maybe some of the older frailer ones shouldn’t be burdened with tasks beyond word processing, but the increasing numbers of us have huge power at our fingertips. It may raise concerns about the carbon cost of leaving a computer running for a task which has no immediate personal benefit but most of the power put to folding in computer idle time would arguably have been wasted anyway. Competition is fierce for the top spots with thousands of members, but we can have fun in our own little Universities of the UK league. Join team 154131!