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HEXUS folding@home team smashes the 100 million point barrier

by Scott Bicheno on 3 March 2011, 11:56

Tags: HEXUS

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The HEXUS folding@home team had a record month in February in its drive to top 100 million points before the end of the month.

Sadly, as the team's most prolific folder 1stRaven posted on Tuesday morning, the team didn't quite make the mark before the end of February, but it was a close run thing.

"...and we hit a total of 99,237,759," wrote 1stRaven. "Even though it's disappointing to miss the 10 million, 11,255,865 points in a month is a massive total and just over 2.5 million points better than any other month. Well done everyone!"

The HEXUS editorial team would like to echo those congratulations. I personally don't know too much about the team, but even I can tell that ranking 126 out of a field of almost 200,000 is a top effort.

I do know a tiny bit about biochemistry, however, having been a very poor microbiology student longer ago than I care to dwell on. Proteins define and run the way our metabolism works. From digestive enzymes to monoclonal antibodies, all our bodily processes are governed by proteins, which come in almost infinite shapes, sizes and combinations of amino acids.

The knowledge of how proteins fold is critical, not just to understanding their function, but also to tackling the diseases related to mis-folding, such as Parkinson's disease. So massive are the variables associated with protein folding that only a distributed computing project such as Folding@home could hope to tackle this problem in timely fashion.

So further congratulations go to the HEXUS team, and the entire project, for their contribution to medical science.



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Thanks Scott, the support of the Hexus editorial team in publicising the cause is very welcome. And whilst the competitive edge that point-gathering gives to folding is massive fun, the real winner from the project is medical science.

It's well worth remembering that even if, like me, you're not able to churn out massive points, every single protein folded is an important step towards understanding and treating a wide range of diseases caused by protein malfunction. You don't have to fold 24/7 on an i7 980X to make a difference! So I'd urge every hexite who has an HTPC sitting practically idle; a laptop that's used largely for web surfing; or a beast of a gaming machine that occasionally gets used for word processing to stick a folding client on their machine and use those spare CPU and GPU cycles to aid medical science!
Front page news. Zing!

Edit: Now, about those pink names… ;)
Same as scaryjim, I don't throw everything at Folding@Home, I only run the SMP client whilst I am working so I may get a few units a week done.