This page will describe and discuss the background context of the F@H View project; it contains a description of the background context of the Folding@home project and the problems and opportunities associated with it, a description of the proposed solution, the Aim and Objectives of the project and finishes with the chosen development method.
The Pande lab at Stanford University led by Professor Vijay Pande runs Folding@home. It is a distributed computing project with the goal "to understand protein folding, miss-folding and related diseases" (Folding@home, 2000-2010). People donate idle CPU cycles on their own machines by running a Folding@home client to do calculations on "work units" sent to users from Stanford University's work servers. Once the client has finished a work unit, the results are sent back to one of Stanford's Collection servers.
Although you do not get anything for your contributions to the project, except for maybe points awarded for completing work units that can be used to compete against other members of your team on the leader-boards that can be found on the main Folding@home website. You can feel good in yourself as you are contributing to help towards the understanding of why proteins do not fold correctly (mis-fold) to help find cures for "many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes" (Folding@home, 2000-2010)
To contribute to the Folding@home project, you must download a piece of software known as a "client" from the Folding@home main homepage hosted by the Pande Lab at Stanford University. This site has information about setting up the client(s), a background into the science behind the project, results and research papers using data returned into the project by its users and statistics such as donor leader-boards and project descriptions.
Each client downloads files from one of Stanford University's work servers; the user's machine uses it's idle CPU cycles to do some calculations on the downloaded work unit and stores results locally on the users machine. The client tracks the progress of the work unit using these files until the work has been completed. The results are then sent to one of Stanford universities collection servers where the results can be analysed.
The Folding@home client utilises a number of different programs called "cores" to do the work on work units; hexadecimal numbers are the unique identifiers of these cores. Each core has a specific purpose and certain cores can only run on certain platforms.
The project is going to be heavily based upon the Folding@home client released by Stanford University, therefore a thorough understanding of how the client works is required, However there is a lack of literature that has been written to date that is directly related to what is proposed within this project. Information about all the core technologies that this project will be based upon will be researched instead to enable this project to be completed successfully.