I remember when Folding@home first showed up around 7-8 years ago. Seti@home was all the rage at the time, but I really wanted to use my spare CPU cycles for my something that I really cared about, and Vijay Pande’s project was just the right balance between geek, cool, and my favorite scientific problem at the time. There have been many other interesting screensaver projects since then. The Berkeley Open Interface Network (BOINC) service on which Set@home now runs has a bunch of relevant projects, including Rosetta@home (running David Baker’s famous ab initio prediction program), and Predictor@home from Charlie Brooks. Others I have run at various time through the years are IBM’s World Community Grid, which includes a number of cool projects, and now defunct precursor of the World Community Grid that was a joint project of IBM, United Devices, Accelrys and others (Disclaimer: I used to work for Accelrys at the time).
Anyway, getting back to the title of the post. Essentially instead of writing a long response to Chris Pirillo’s broadcast on what he calls an “E-charity”, I figured I’d write something here. Chris asks “What other E-charities are you involved in? Do you believe the work these places are doing is above excellent and the wave of the future?”
I answered the first earlier. I have also been known to be skeptical of grid computing in pharma companies. However, I do believe that one day we will do a lot of computing in the cloud, and through grids. In the meantime, I agree wholeheartedly that screensaver projects like the ones described about are quite useful, as the success of Folding@home has shown.
Folding@home gets the Pirillo treatment
I remember when Folding@home first showed up around 7-8 years ago. Seti@home was all the rage at the time, but I really wanted to use my spare CPU cycles for my something that I really cared about, and Vijay Pande’s project was just the right balance between geek, cool, and my favorite scientific problem at the time. There have been many other interesting screensaver projects since then. The Berkeley Open Interface Network (BOINC) service on which Set@home now runs has a bunch of relevant projects, including Rosetta@home (running David Baker’s famous ab initio prediction program), and Predictor@home from Charlie Brooks. Others I have run at various time through the years are IBM’s World Community Grid, which includes a number of cool projects, and now defunct precursor of the World Community Grid that was a joint project of IBM, United Devices, Accelrys and others (Disclaimer: I used to work for Accelrys at the time).
Anyway, getting back to the title of the post. Essentially instead of writing a long response to Chris Pirillo’s broadcast on what he calls an “E-charity”, I figured I’d write something here. Chris asks “What other E-charities are you involved in? Do you believe the work these places are doing is above excellent and the wave of the future?”
I answered the first earlier. I have also been known to be skeptical of grid computing in pharma companies. However, I do believe that one day we will do a lot of computing in the cloud, and through grids. In the meantime, I agree wholeheartedly that screensaver projects like the ones described about are quite useful, as the success of Folding@home has shown.
Of course, since it’s Chris, I answer in kind
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(Apologies for the screen reflection in my glasses and the low volume. Still not a video guru)
Technorati Tags: Grid Computing, Protein Folding, Folding@home, Protein Structure Prediction