The SETI@Home project always seemed a bit foolish to me since it was questionable whether or not the project aimed at solving a real problem (i.e. if there is no alien civilization within very narrow parameters near us, the project is a waste of time). On the other hand, Folding@Home seems right up my alley.
Like SETI@Home, Folding@Home is an attempt to use distributed computing to solve a big problem. Unlike SETI@Home, however, the Folding folks are pretty sure there’s a solution to what they’re studying, it just requires incredible computing power to get at. The problem being: how do proteins self-assemble. On the one hand this is one of the most basic and essential phenomenon that is necessary for life, and on the other hand it’s kind of amazing that not only is nobody sure exactly how it happens, but that a process that happens probably millions of times every day with ease requires the sort of computing power that is difficult to assemble even today.
Just like SETI@Home, to participate you download a screen-saver type utility that runs parts of the calculations when you’re not using your computer. Your system then passes back its part of the solution as do other machines and then everything gets assembled into meaningful results back to the folks at Stanford.
I’m probably going to download this and install it just out of self-interest. As I mentioned the other day, I’d prefer not to die and solving the protein folding problem would almost certainly lead to a great deal of new knowledge about various human diseases. Sure contacting ET would be cool, but better understanding what goes wrong in Alzheimer patients (where proteins in the brain start doing very bizarre things) would be even better.