Team Christians

General BOINC Discussion and Other Projects
Discuss BOINC in general and other projects

Folding@home
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding.
What is protein folding?
Proteins are biology's workhorses- its "nanomachines." Proteins help your body break down food into energy, regulate your moods, and fight disease. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology much of the process remains a mystery.

When proteins do not fold correctly (misfolding), there can be serious health consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, AIDS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers.

If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses.

GPUGRID
GPUGRID.net is a volunteer distributed computing project for biomedical research from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain). GPUGRID is made of many graphics cards (GPUs) joined together to deliver high-performance all-atom biomolecular simulations. The molecular simulations performed by our volunteers are some of the most common types performed by scientists in the field, but they are also some of the most computationally demanding and usually require a supercomputer.
http://www.gpugrid.net/

Einstein@Home
"Einstein@Home uses your computer's idle time to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope, and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite. Einstein@Home volunteers have already discovered more than three dozens new neutron stars, and we hope to find many more in the future. Our long-term goal is to make the first direct detections of gravitational-wave emission from spinning neutron stars. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago, but have never been directly detected. Such observations would open up a new window on the universe, and usher in a new era in astronomy."
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP)
"SIMAP is a database of protein similarities and protein domains. It contains about all currently published protein sequences and is continuously updated. Protein similarities are computed using the FASTA algorithm which provides optimal speed and sensitivity. Protein domains are calculated using the InterPro methods and databases. SIMAP is to our knowledge the only project that combines comprehensive coverage with respect to all known proteins and incremental update capabilities."
http://boincsimap.org/boincsimap/

Asteroids@Home
"The project Asteroids@home was started with the aim to significanly enlarge our knowledge of physical properties of asteroids. The BOINC application uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived."
http://asteroidsathome.net/

yoyo@home
yoyo@home is running five different projects focusing on various types of research including finding factors for different kinds of numbers, simulating and designing parts of a particle accelerator, analysis of human mitochondrial DNA and a project searching for the shortest Optimal Golumb Ruler of the length 27.
http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/

BOINC Pentathlon
An annual event sponsored by SETI.Germany where all BOINC-Teams are invited to participate. This competition is inspired by the Pentathlon of the ancient world. Just like in ancient Greece teams perform this BOINC Pentathlon by running 5 different disciplines. This means within 2 weeks the participants will need to crunch 5 different projects, each for 5 days.
http://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentat ... lcome.html