Are you participating in the Immortality Institute's Folding@Home competition? You should be - there are prizes, after all. It's a group effort to move the Longevity Meme Folding@Home team up in the rankings, with modest sums of money for the best contributers in each new quarter.

I was reminded by the organizers that the new quarter of competition kicked off this month - it's not too late to jump on in:

Many thanks to all of the visionaries and contributors who made the inaugural quarter of the F@H Prize a resounding success! The Longevity Meme folding team rose from rank 199 to 172 (as of June 24th) while increasing its point per day output by 150 percent!!

The 2nd quarter of competition is beginning on July 1st (all competitor’s scores will be reset to zero) and even more cash is up for grabs thanks to a generous donation by Maciek K. So get ready to rev up your PS3s, overclock your CPUs and, max out your GPUs.

***Special Note: Even though the starting date of the 2nd quarter of competition is July 1st, you can join at any time and your points will start accumulating from the date you register***

When I head on over to the team stats online, I see we're at rank 166 with an impressive trendline on the results chart. Moving up the ranks is tough going in the upper levels; congratulations are due to the contributers.

If you'd like to learn more about the scientific research and results accumulating from the Folding@Home program, you should take a look at the official site:

Folding@Home has been a success. In 2000-2001, we have folded several small, fast folding proteins, with experimental validation of our method. We are now working to further develop our method, and to apply it to more complex and interesting proteins and protein folding and misfolding questions. Since then (2002-2006), Folding@Home has studied more complex proteins, reporting on the folding of many proteins on the microsecond timescale.

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More recently (2006-present), we have been putting a great deal of effort into studying proteins relevant for diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Hunntington's Disease.

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We feel strongly that a Distributed Computing project must not just run calculations on millions of PC's, but DC projects must produce results, especially in the form of peer reviewed publications, public lectures, and other ways to disseminate the results from FAH to the greater scientific community.

Posted by Reason at July 7, 2008 4:47 PM | TrackBack (0)