The Immortality Institute's Folding@Home prize contest enters its third quarter:

The 2nd quarter of the F@H prize competition came to a close September 30th and it was been another blowout quarter in terms of team success. During the 2nd quarter the Longevity Meme team rose from position 167 to 124 (as of Sept 24th) while PPD output increased 200% (up to an average of 160,000).

The 3rd quarter competition is now in swing (all competitor’s scores were reset to zero October 1st) and even more prize money is up for grabs due to generous support from the Life Extension Foundation. Not only has the prize amount for the top twelve competitors increased, a 13th prize has been added – to be randomly awarded to one folder who is outside of the top 12. To top it all off, the Life Extension Foundation has offered a free 6 month LEF membership to all of the F@H prize registrants

Competitors are earning their prizes by contributing unused processor cycles from their computers to the Stanford Folding@Home project.

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.

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Folding@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.

It's easy to jump on in and compete:

1. Go to the Stanford Folding@home website and download the folding client to your computer (or PS3), link: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download

2. Enter the number 32461 (Longevity Meme team number) in the “team number” box when installing the Folding@home client.

3. Register as a “Registered User” or “Member” at the Immortality Institute and affirm your participation in the competition by making an initial post in this forum: http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=20898. This step is required as the Institute will be paying the prize money to the winners through Paypal. You must have a Paypal account in order to receive your winnings. Also, if you already registered during the 1st or 2nd quarter, there is no need to register again.

Winners will be determined by how many points are accumulated over the course of three months as reported at the Stanford Folding@home statistics site. The 3rd quarter of competition begins at 12:00 a.m. Eastern daylight time (U.S.) October 1st and ends at 12:00 midnight, Eastern daylight time, on December 31st.

What are you waiting for?

Posted by Reason at October 8, 2008 7:52 PM | TrackBack (0)