What is folding? Folding is a worldwide distributed computing effort conducted by Stanford University to understand how proteins assemble themselves. The real world applications of this research includes potential cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, and Parkinson's. Nearly everyone's life has been touched by someone who has had one of these diseases or one of the many other diseases this research is aiming to cure. Why should I fold? What's in it for me? Just the knowledge that you're contributing to a very good cause. We do this because we can, because we have the computing power to offer. From a purely fun perspective, as you fold you are awarded points. These points help generate some competition and fun between members and other teams. I don't a high powered folding gear. Is it worth it? Absolutely! All to often you will see one of the regulars answering this questions with a "EVERY little bit helps". With the various client types, pretty much any system can help to contribute to the cause. What does it cost? The software is free, and there are no fees of any kind for participating in folding. If you fold 24/7 and/or have several computers folding, you will likely notice a increase in your electric bill. So basically it's like Seti, they use millions of users computers that have dedicated part of their CPU/GPU power to crunch numbers instead of a super computer. It's definitely worth a look. http://folding.stanford.edu/
I'm sure that if they were using it for there own personal gains, someone would have caught it by now. It's a tech nerd type thing and they love to pour over data. The code is all open source so if you know what you're looking at, you could find out for yourself. EVGA will even pay you $10 a month in store credit, or whatever you want to call it, if you hit a certain target folding.
Stanford has a 22 billion dollar endowment, and they want to put my computer on their botnet for free?
They collect and put together the data, then give it to the scientists. They don't charge a dime for it. Just to rent a supercomputer is very expensive. Just a couple years ago, the folding computer network was in the top 10 for super computers. Just to rent a super computer with 80 teraflops of power is about $1200 an hour. Folding is putting out 75,000 teraflops. How far would that $22b go if you wanted the same processing power?
You can now fold towards the cure for the Corona Virus! The combined effort right now of people folding towards the cure for the Corona Virus is more powerful than the top 7 Super Computers combined.
