MacRumors Folding@home Team Reaches Two Billion Points [Mac Blog]

The MacRumors Folding@home team has contributed over two billion points to the distributed computing medical research project, reaching this milestone on November 12. It took 11.5 years for the MacRumors team to accumulate its first billion points, but the team completed its second billion points in only 12.5 months, thanks in large part to today's faster GPUs, as well as Quick Return Bonus Points and users running the client software with optimized configuations. The team has risen from #55 to #45 among the over 225,000 folding teams.

We're proud that our supporters and forum members are contributing to medical research by participating in Folding@home, and MacRumors encourages you to join our team as well. Folding@home participants receive work units as computation assignments and completed work units are assigned points based on their value to the project's scientific purposes. Client software is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and users should feel free to ask questions in our Distributed Computing forum.

The MacRumors Folding@home team was formed in May 2002 by MacRumors owner Arnold Kim. The team currently averages over 78 million points per month, almost 40 times its rate a year ago. Over 2000 users have contributed to the MacRumors team effort, with 5 team members (rwh202, twoodcc, Louis_Wu, ChristianFAH, and whiterabbit) each having contributed over 100 million points. Additional team statistics and graphs can be viewed at Extreme Overclocking.

Folding@home, run by Stanford University since October 2000, uses otherwise-idle computers to run protein folding simulation software, helping researchers search for cures for Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, AIDS, influenza, and many forms of cancer. The software simulates how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold, both to gain understanding of how proteins fold into their three-dimensional structure and to study the causes of the abnormal folding that leads to disease.