Hardlines Research

Want to work with your fellow hardware dealers to conduct scientific research?  Stanford University is researching protein folding, and they want to use your computer's "spare" CPU time to help with their research.

Here's some quick info about the Hardlines Digest team I created at the Folding@Home website.

Basically, you download software at the site that will install a special screen saver.  While the screen saver runs (usually while you're not using your PC) the computer works on calculations of protein folding.  Once the calculations are complete, your computer submits the results to Stanford and downloads a new "work unit".

If you want to participate, download the software and then install it.  The first time you run the program, enter the team number 10205 so Hardlines Digest will get credit for your work.  The "credit" is nothing more than seeing the results posted on the site and knowing that you've contributed in some way to a very cool networked research project.

FYI, there are a number of other distributed computing projects.  Seti@Home is probably the most well known...they are analyzing radio signals received from space, looking for messages from ET.  United Devices has a cancer research screensaver that works in a similar fashion.