[Cialug] PC diagnostics

[Todd Walton]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Tom Sellers <tomsellers2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the suggestions!  I don't know what folding at home is at this point but will look into it.  If this process encounters an error does it stop or what?

>From http://folding.stanford.edu/ :

==========================================
Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before
proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble
themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical
and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a
mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there
can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such
as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's
disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding at home is a distributed computing project -- people from
throughout the world download and run software to band together to
make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer
takes the project closer to our goals. Folding at home uses novel
computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate
problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
==========================================

-todd