Folding@Home is a “cause computing” project. It’s a process that grabs idle cycles on your computer and uses them to help compute massive scientific problems. The grandaddy of these is distributed.net, which used idle computers to brute-force very large ciphers, but this kind of ad-hoc distributed computation really came into its own with SETI@Home, which did 250,000 CPU-years of computation in its first year of operation, and quickly exhausted the radio telescope data available to the extra-terrestrial intelligence researchers who set up the program.
Adam Beberg, one of the founders of distributed.net, wrote a distcomp manifesto, where he summed up the distributed computation ethic neatly:
You got a new system today didn’t you, lots of megahertz and gigabytes with all the toys, top of the line everything. Now what are you gonna do with it? Type email? Play some games for a couple hours a day?
In the time you read that your computer did a few billion nothings.
What a waste.
*click click click*
Meanwhile, all over the world, people are desperate for somethings. A graduate student trying to figure out protein folding, and an artist is trying to render a short film. Alone it will take them months, maybe years to complete their projects.
The net could do it in a few minutes.
You wouldn’t even know it’s running. You can’t tell a nothing from a something, only the computer knows and it doesn’t care.
When you’re lost in the desert, you can get water by digging a shallow pit, putting a bowl in the middle of it and throwing a tarp over it. The sun turns the moisture in the soil into vapor and it condenses on the tarp, then drips into the bowl. It’s free water in a water-scarce zone, available to anyone with a tarp and some patience. CPU cycles are the same kind of resource — all around us, powerful, solid-state Turing Machines are sitting idle, doing nothing. These machines don’t wear appreciably with use, and their idle cycles can’t be banked — turning your computer off today won’t give you a machine that’s twice as fast tomorrow (though, as Bruce Sterling reminds us, they do consume electricity).
Folding@Home aimed to solve one of the fundamental problems of technology-assisted medicine:
“The process of protein folding remains a mystery,” said Pande, assistant professor of chemistry and of structural biology at Stanford. “When proteins misfold, they sometimes clump together, forming aggregates in the brain that have been observed in patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases.”
How proteins fold into their ideal conformation is a question that has tantalized scientists for decades. To solve the problem, researchers have turned to computer simulation – a process that requires an enormous amount of computing power.
“One reason that protein folding is so difficult to simulate is that it occurs amazingly fast,” Pande explained. “Small proteins have been shown to fold in a timescale of microseconds [millionths of a second], but it takes the average computer one day just to do a one-nanosecond [billionth-of-a-second] folding simulation.”
Simulating protein folding is often considered a “holy grail” of computational biology, he added. “This is an area of hot competition that includes a number of heavy weights, such as IBM’s $100-million, million-processor Blue Gene supercomputer project.”
able to perform 32,500 folding simulations and accumulate 700 microseconds of folding data. These simulations tested the folding rate of the protein on a 5-, 10- and 20-nanosecond timescale under different temperatures. Using these data, the scientists were able to predict the folding rate and trajectory of the “average” molecule.
The machines ranged from consumer off-the-shelf machines to wickedly overclocked custom jobs. In two short years, they advanced medical science, without supercomputers, without gargantuan budgets. Distcomp startups have focused on dull applications like crunching actuarial tables or working out mineral exploration problems, but the basic science stuff is what compels the popular imagination, convinces us each and all to throw a tarp over our computers and change the world.