If you have never heard of distributed computing before, you are probably not alone. In short, there is research and such being done around the world by thousands of facilities . Most of these facilities, which tend to be on college campuses and other not so well funded locations, rely on massive computing power to run their models and experiments. This is where distributed computing comes in. Distributed Computing allows these facilites to leverage the dormant processing power of any computer with access to the internet in order to produce a large grid based super computer. What that means is that you and me have the ability to lend our computers to the scientists while we sleep or even when we take out 15 afternoon coffee break. It is a free and non-obtrusive way for you to lend a hand in the search for the cures of many diseases.

The Folding@Home Distribued Computing based out of Stanford Univeristy is just one of those labs looking for your help. These guys specialize in studying protein folding. Here is a little background on why they need your extra bandwidth:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” 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.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I have downloaded their software and have it running on my laptop here as I write this. I am having no issues with doing my daily work while at the same time pitching in to help out. I have set up a Folding@Home team called the akaRaff Computing Posse so please use team ID 47784 when running the client. Though we may not be able to take down other teams like Google, maybe be can get together and make a run at some of the smaller folks.

Enjoy.