Last week TrevorO was away on a tropical island in the Pacific collecting data for one of our ongoing (but classified) projects. We didn’t hear from him all week which we assumed meant either:
- he got eaten by sharks
- he fell in love with some beautiful natives
- he was captured by our enemies
- all of the above
Anyway, not knowing whether he was coming back or not, Kevin (@yinkei) and I (@joshwilsdon) decided to slack off for a couple hours and cure Cancer, Parkinsons and several other annoying maladies. Hopefully he’s not too mad.
Well, ok… These diseases haven’t *quite* been cured yet, but we’re trying to help! We created a Folding @ Home team for Layerboom and we’ve been using some machines which we need to do some load testing on anyway to fold some proteins in the name of science.
A 3D model (of a heteropolymer?)
If you’ve not heard about Folding @ Home before, check out their website. It’s got all kinds of interesting info. If you just want to join team Layerboom so that you can ensure the “Layerboom cures Cancer!” headline can be reprinted later in serious scientific publications such as The Onion Sci/Tech Section, you should start a client and use team 171568 when you configure it. See if you can score more points than Kevin (kevinykchan) or I (JoshW) have contributed on our own home machines.
Team Layerboom is rocketing up the charts and in under 2 weeks we’ve moved into the top 4000 for total contributions. Pretty good considering there are more than 165,000 teams and the project has been running since October 1, 2000! If you’re just curious about our team progress, check out our team page or check out these more detailed stats from free-dc.org.
P.S. Most of the work contributed by the Layerboom user so far has been done on the new ultra-powerful 8 core monster servers that will soon be powering some of our public facing stuff. All this power will be available to you soon!
