3D Graphics silicon company ATI Technologies, has announced that Stanford University has released software to utilise its processors for Stanford's Folding@home distributed computing project.
This combination helps in disease research with high-speed computing. With this processing capability, researchers expect to study protein-related diseases, as also Alzheimer's, cancer, Huntington's and Parkinson's. The quest to understand diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's is the reason why the Folding@home programme exists. The programme studies the ways in which proteins fold. While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, today the concept is still considered to be a mystery. When proteins do not fold correctly, consequences include a number of diseases. To study this area, thousands of home computers together worldwide study folding by taking advantage of each computer's processing power to form a distributed supercomputer. This consists of approximately 2 lakh computers, using various computer processors. With support for ATI processors, Folding@home participants and disease researchers are tapping into the new capabilities offered by these advanced architectures performing scientific calculations at high speed.
