RowdyRuff.net Folding@Home Team

I am sure that we all know or have known people that have been stricken with a disease.  Diseases with treatments that have little chance of success.  No real possibility for a cure. The likes of Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, Cystic Fibrosis, the list goes on...  Hoping that a cure could be found, knowing the outlook was hopeless.

Well, maybe it won't be hopeless much longer.  A group of researchers has developed a way to gather a better understanding how diseases may be created.  It involves looking at the way proteins self-assemble or "fold."  It is a possible key to learning how to prevent or cure some of these diseases.  However, protein folding requires an enormous amount of computer time as countless folding possibilities are needed.

This is where our ability to help begins. We can all share our computers' unused resources to assist the researchers in expediting this protein folding.  A more detailed explanation can be found at the Folding@Home's website.

The program can be set to run in the background, off of your computers resources that you are not using.  It does not slow down what you are doing; it is designed to use only the "idle" cycles of your processor, which will otherwise go to waste.  A very small price for a very noble cause.

I hope that you will realize the potential and join the folding team with us.

You can download the windows client here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/download.html

Once you install it, you just leave it running and it will do the rest.  You must have an Internet connection so it can transmit the results back to the server.

To start the program, click your "START" button, go to "Programs" and click "Folding@Home".  Note that you can set it to start automatically by clicking "Enable Auto Startup" Recommended.

Next, you will be prompted for your name. Please add RowdyRuff.net in parenthesis after you name.  For example, if your name is going to be "Blossom", you would enter "Blossom (RowdyRuff.net)".  Please be sure to spell the website's name EXACTLY AS YOU SEE IT! MAKE SURE YOU KEEP EVERYTHING LOWERCASE EXCEPT FOR THE 'R's.

Once you've entered your name and team name after it, just click "NEXT>".

I even made a team logo for the program:

If you are under 18, please ask your parent's permission to install this program. It doesn't cost anything and is 100% free to use.

This isn't the most user friendly program to use, so if you have any problems installing it, please email me.  If enough people start joining the cause, I may make a new section here in the forums to discuss how to best run this program.

If you need any help, please e-mail me.