- Joined
- Jun 23, 2007
- Messages
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[Insert Crysis Joke Here]
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjOW5iW7dJQ&eurl[/ame]
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I WONDER IF IT WILL RUN CRYSIS??? haha joke
I am going to ask my stupid question!
Whats a folding computer?
LOL at dieinpeace, I'm going to be the one who's going to write a little intro to folding.
Well, folding is more specifically protein folding, which studies the way a protein molecule is folded, ie, shaped. The shape or fold of the protein affects the properties of the protein immensely: for example, prions, the stuff that cause mad cow disease, are simply abnormally folded proteins folded in a really weird way that, when it touches other proteins, folds then too in that weird way.
Folding can also be done on a program on a computer, and one such effort is folding@home, a huge distributed computing network that has millions of computers around the world help out by attempting to find optimal foldings for given proteins to hep science. Folding is one of the biggest questions in science currently, and it takes a lot of processing power to fold a protein in a way that simulates the real folding of it.
Recently, (or not so recently) they came out with a new mode which allowed usage of your GPU, (graphics card) as well as your CPU. You can also use your PS3 to fold proteins to help science, and in fact PS3's contribute a huge portion of the total processing power that the whole network has. GPU's, like the GTX295, are also usable, and since they're pretty much as powerful as CPU's nowadays (if not stronger, like in the case of the GTX295) can also pack quite a punch, computation-wise.