Donate your spare CPU cycles to Folding@home

If you have never heard of it, Folding@home is a distributed computing effort run by the Pande lab at Stanford University researching the “folding” of proteins.  The idea is simple; instead of building an expensive supercomputer to model protein folding, allow ordinary people to donate their spare CPU cycles.

Most modern computers spend an inordinate amount of time at idle; even my ancient laptop with its Mobile Pentium 4 at 2.66Mhz is usually showing in excess of 85% idle when running no applications on Natty.  FAH (as Folding@home is usually abbreviated to) aims to use this spare capacity of hundreds-of-thousands of machines around the world and you can contribute too.

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