Moonlighting

My computer is moonlighting at XTeam@Rosetta, a small group of computers donating otherwise idle CPU time to the Rosetta@Home project.The Rosetta@Home group out of the University of Washington is doing important work in the field of protein structures.  Specifically, they are attempting to get better at predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences which could have implications in the future treatment of Alzheimer's, HIV and Malaria.As one of their volunteers, instead of a normal screensaver, my computer gets to work folding and refolding proteins.These distributed computing projects are an important way for researchers to process much more data (i.e. get further in their research) than they actually have computers (i.e. funding) to accomplish, moving science and medicine further than it could ever go without volunteers.  At the same time, by asking for help, they are providing the public the unprecedented opportunity to participate in cutting edge research.The 7 minute video below does a great job of explaining the project itself and this quote does an equally great job of explaining the impact of the volunteers, "Before BOINC we had around 400 computers that we could run our calculations on locally, but now with BOINC, we have thousands of computers that we can run our jobs on located all around the globe.".  Currently there are around 60,000 active users.#CollaborationForTheWin