On The Cancer Blog today, Leonardo talks about
the Human Proteome Folding Project, which allows you, dear reader, to “donate” your idle computer time to a most worthy
cause: cancer research.
It’s a cause that hits home for me. My father passed away last spring from cancer, my grandmother had cancer and my
mother is currently battling cancer.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with similar grid computing projects. Perhaps you run
SETI@Home with hopes that you will be the one to discover
human life on another planet. Some of you may even be Folding@Home, perhaps
with Team Mac OS X, with hopes of contributing to cures for Alzheimers and
other diseases.
Unfortunately, there is still no Mac client that will enable Mac users to participate in projects like this one. There
are workarounds, however. True geeks can run the UD (United Devices, the developers of the client software) agent
using Darwine on any 10.2.6+ Mac. Or you can run the Windows
UD client under Virtual PC.
If you are going to run Windows, it might as well be for a worthy cause! For an explanation as to why there is not and
most likely won’t be a Mac UD client, see this post in
grid.org’s forums.
For more info on the project, visit grid.org.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-16-2005 @ 4:15PM
Cameron Palmer said...
Actually the post you refer to is quite old. Check the FAQ at the World Community Grid. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/join_now/software_faqs.html#linux
Reply
6-16-2005 @ 4:15PM
susato said...
Thanks, Laurie, for mentioning Folding@Home in your entry. It has resulted in quite a few visitors to the Team MacOS X website (www.teammacosx.com)
Possibly of interest - the Pande lab at Stanford, organizers of the Folding@Home project, have just published an article in Nature (a leading scientific journal) about F@H simulation of a cancer suppressor protein - the first publication of distributed computing results specifically related to cancer.
We're delighted to see this article in print and to have helped to make it possible. If you're reading this, please consider joining the F@H project and any of the great Mac teams participating in it.
Reply