At  01:18 PM 12/21/00, Bruce Toback wrote:
>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/>.

>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.

I haven't checked, but I suspect that "Cosm" in that URL relates to Adam
Beberg's project that is a (sort of) spin-off from distributed.net a year
or so ago.  Beberg was one of the founders of distributed.net a few years
back but left the group to work on his vision of distributed computing
projects which he named "Cosm".

In any case, I've been contributing otherwise unused CPU cycles (and a very
small bit of internet bandwidth) to distributed.net projects since 1997 and
would recommend them to anyone interested.  The current projects D.net is
working on are RC5-64 (an RSA encryption challenge) and finding "Optimal
Golomb Rulers" which is a mathematical concept with practical real-world
use in such things as optimal sensor placement in Xray crystallography and
radio astronomy.

If Seti@Home isn't your thing, then I think contributing idle CPU cycles to
Folding@Home or Distributed.net are good ideas.  And if you work on D.net,
consider joining the team I'm on there, "Libertarians for Privacy"
(#1661).  More info on the team can be found at: http://www.catamount.com/rc5/

--
Jeff Woods
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