The Nirmukta Freethought Community

By downloading a piece of software and signing up for Rosetta@home, you are helping scientists find important energy values for important proteins implicated in disease like malaria,HIV and cancer! You will donate some of your CPU time and hard disk to analyze important protein parameters. If you have a recent computer, decently powerful graphics card and no ceiling internet download plan, you could help!
Go here
And if we many Nirmukta users to sign up and dedicate a few hours of CPU time every day , I can create a Nirmukta Team on the project website and all our subsequent contributions (measured in points) would be reflected there! Do let me know what you users think! All for a good cause! Spread the scientific word.

That's a great idea, Nick.

At work, we're already dedicating our resources to Folding@home.

(20-07-2011 11:00 AM)Pratibha Wrote:  That's a great idea, Nick.

At work, we're already dedicating our resources to Folding@home.

Awesome, I'm happy (and surprised that the company admin allowed you to install this) about this ! I already emailed my Alma mater's biotech department and asked him to do the same. But no reply yet!
Every little helps,what say?

Peace
Nick.

Wasn't there a similar program for Xboxes? I remember reading something about five years ago or so where one could connect their Xbox up to a server or computer that would use it's CPU to run calculations. I think it's a great idea but I've never done it before.

(20-07-2011 11:00 AM)Pratibha Wrote:  That's a great idea, Nick.

At work, we're already dedicating our resources to Folding@home.

Nice, I heard about this when it came out, but haven't really contributed. For many years I contributed to SETI@home, the one that started it all.

(30-08-2011 11:42 PM)UrsulaT Wrote:  Wasn't there a similar program for Xboxes? I remember reading something about five years ago or so where one could connect their Xbox up to a server or computer that would use it's CPU to run calculations. I think it's a great idea but I've never done it before.

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought an Xbox could provide that much processing power, but I guess every little bit counts.

(31-08-2011 09:17 PM)Ajita Kamal Wrote:  Interesting. I wouldn't have thought an Xbox could provide that much processing power, but I guess every little bit counts.

There are some particular types of calculations which are more faster on GPUs and gaming consoles having quite a bit of graphics processing power. To get the equivalent power in a PC, it would need a dedicated graphics card which can cost more than Rs. 5000 (I could be wrong. It's been a long time since I gave up PC gaming).

On PS3, Folding@home can run about 10x faster on a than on a PC because it takes advantage of the hardware:

Quote:People often use the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) as a metric for the speed of a computer. One question that arises is how to compare machines with radically different architectures. In particular, what requires only a few operations (or even just a single operation) on one machine could require many operations on another. Classic examples are evaluations of functions like the exp(x) or sin(x). On GPU and Cell hardware, functions like this can often be calculated very quickly, say in one cycle, while this is often counted as 10-20 operations for other machines.

Here's some recent coverage of an initiative to recruit lay PC-user populations in research questions like the Protein Folding Problem.

Here's the resource page for the program foldit. Here is a shoutout from Steven Novella.

(20-09-2011 04:34 AM)arvindiyer Wrote:  Here's some recent coverage of an initiative to recruit lay PC-user populations in research questions like the Protein Folding Problem.

That is plain amazing.

The following TED talk by Prof. Jay Bradner of Harvard provides an inspirational case study underlining the urgency, and the promise, of open-source and crowd-sourcing efforts in medical research.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_ope...earch.html