Folding At Home

Would you like to help find a cure for amyloidosis, cancer and other diseases? With your computer, you now can, and it's extremely easy to do. All you need is Folding At Home.

WHAT IS FOLDING AT HOME?

Folding At Home is a distributed computing project run by Stanford University. They make software which uses a computer's spare processor cycles to simulate protein folding. The protein folding process is a source of many diseases, including amyloidosis. By simulating this process, scientists will be able to make drugs to fight these diseases.

There are many thousands of people who use Folding At Home. With the software, all of the computers become a 'supercomputer' which performs the calculations needed to simulate protein folding. With all this computing power, calculations which might take years to perform in a lab can be done in days.

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?

In order to run Folding At Home, you need to download the software off of the Folding At Home website. Run the SETUP program, enter in your name and our 'team number', and you are finished.

WILL IT HARM OR SLOW DOWN MY COMPUTER?

Folding At Home contains no spyware or adware! It sits in your system tray and quietly performs all of its work in the background. It is programmed to run at a low prority, meaning that you should not be able to tell that it is running. Of course, you can configure the program any way you want. You can even make it your screensaver!

HOW DO I INSTALL?

1) Download the program from this page.

• If you have Windows XP or Windows 2000, download this file.
• If you have an older version of Windows, download this file.
• If you have a Macintosh, download this file for the graphical client, or go to the download page to get the screensaver.

2) Run the program. Follow the instructions on the screen. It will ask you for two important pieces of information:

• First, it will ask you for your username. This can be anything you want, as long as there are no spaces in the name. For example, mine is Tony_Fazzone.
• Next, it will ask you for a team number. The amyloidosis team number is 47429.
  
• NOTE: You will not officially join the team until you've processed at least one work unit. As soon as you process a work unit, your name (and results) will show up on the Team Tony statistics page.

That's all there is to it!

Of course, once you've finished, you can configure the program by right-clicking the Folding At Home icon in your system tray. The icon looks like a red gear. From here, you can change how fast you want to program to run, or if you want to use it as a screensaver.

Want to learn more? Check out the team's website, located at http://fazzone.com/amyloid/teamtony.

PLEASE HELP

I hope you decide to run Folding At Home. Every computer that runs it will increase the odds of finding cures for these deadly diseases. If you have any questions, please don't hesistate to contact me, and I will try to help you out in any way I can.