And, Bruce, no offense given or taken I am sure, but:

What exactly does this have to do with 3000-L?

Seasons Greetings

John M  Penney
Department of Licensing
State of Washington
Olympia, WA
(360)664-1392
(360)586-1919 (Fax)
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"Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of my employer..."

> ----------
> From:         Bruce Toback[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To:     Bruce Toback
> Sent:         Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:18 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: [HP3000-L] SETI@home Breaks 500K Computer Years
>
> Jeff Sohrt writes:
>
> >Wirt writes:
> >
> >>     o To date, one year later, after a quarter-billion
> >> analyzed packets,
> >> nothing has been detected that appears in any way to be a
> >> non-natural signal
> >> nor a local signal artifact (i.e., nothing extraterrestrially
> >> intelligent).
> >
> >Okay so...
> >Maybe we've just missed the boat entirely.
> >
> >Perhaps these ET beings, if they do exist don't transmit, emanate, give
> off
> >or produce any kind of detectable RF for us to pick up with our current
> >technology.  That's a lot of processing gone to waste.
>
> It depends on your definition of "waste" -- negative results are still
> results.
>
> However, if you're interested in something a bit closer to home, Stanford
> University has started up a distributed computation project they call
> Folding@Home, which uses spare processing power to compute protein shapes
> based on primary structure (amino acid sequence). The home page for the
> project is <http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/>.
>
> Protein shapes are important because it's the shape of a protein that is
> the key to its function. Understanding protein function will permit
> better and faster drug design, among other benefits. Current methods of
> protein structure determination aren't very satisfactory because they're
> difficult and time-consuming -- and they require that proteins be taken
> out of their usual watery environment, which changes their shape to start
> with.
>
> Computational techniques are still in their infancy, primarily because
> they take so much power to execute for any significant protein. The
> Folding@Home project has developed a new method of computing the dynamics
> of a molecule that allows the computation to be spread over multiple
> computers -- hence the new project.
>
> The project currently has Windows and Linux clients. When they finish
> their Macintosh client, I'll be handing my SETI@Home "credits" to Team
> HP3000-L and switching to [log in to unmask] That's not because I think SETI
> isn't worthwhile; it's just that I have a long-standing interest in
> computational biology, and this looks like a project worth following from
> that standpoint.
>
> But if you think SETI isn't a good waste of time, and you'd like to waste
> time some other way, the Folding@Home project may be just what your
> computer needs to keep busy at night.
>
> -- Bruce
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bruce Toback    Tel: (602) 996-8601| My candle burns at both ends;
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