UNIX Lab Donates Processing Power to Grid Computing Project

The Westminster College UNIX lab has been helping in the quest to cure diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many forms of cancer.

Computers have been set up in the lab to participate in Folding@Home. Folding@Home is a distributed computing program developed and maintained by the Pange Group at Stanford University.  The program downloads work units from Stanford's servers and processes them locally.  Each work unit contains instructions for the computer on how to process the packet of information.

The goal of the Folding@Home project is to understand how human proteins fold. Folding is how proteins assemble themselves in order to carry out a task within the body.  However, when proteins fold improperly, the consequences are usually serious and often result in disease.

"These machines were not in use by another department," junior computer science major Colin Dean, who is in charge of the local effort, said. "One of my computers at home was doing Folding, so when I saw these unused machines, I knew they could be put to better use while that department was determining how they could be used."

Dean made arrangements with the department to move the computers into the UNIX lab in August.  After a day of setup using Trustix Secure Linux, the machines started processing work units.

"There were nine machines, each machine has a three gigahertz processor in it, for a total of 27 gigahertz," Dean said. "The processors are all able to do hyperthreading, a function that, in short, makes the computer think it has two processors.  All together, we were essentially contributing 18 processors and 54 gigahertz of processing power."

Dean would like to see the campus community get involved with it eventually.  He is working on documentation to instruct students how to install the program, which runs as a screen saver for Microsoft® Windows or as a daemon for UNIX-based systems like Mac OS X and Linux. So far, only one student, sophomore computer science major Ryan Moore, is donating.

"Folding doesn't interfere with anything I'm doing on my computer and there's that slight
chance that I might help save someone's life," Moore said.
"I have two machines at home running it and two machines in the office of The Holcad running it as well," said Dean, who is also co-editor of The Holcad, the college's student newspaper.

"It's an important project to get involved in and it's great that Colin was interested and took the time to set it up and takes the time to maintain it," Dr. C. David Shaffer, professor of computer science and adviser of the UNIX lab, said.

The computers will be participating in Folding@Home until the machines are needed.

For more information on the college effort, go to http://www.cs.westminster.edu/folding. Live statistics are updated hourly and photographs of the setup can be found there. As of Nov. 18, the college team ranked 1,285 of 41,186 teams donating to the project.

For more information on Folding@Home, go to http://folding.stanford.edu.

Dean is a son of Charles Dean, Volant, and a graduate of Wilmington High School.

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