Folding@Home

[aligholami]

Hi,
I've a question about protein folding process as I am new in this area. I'm some questions and would appreciate if somebody can help me to understand them:

1) What's a typical protein folding problem which is solved by f@h? For instance, a folding problem will be composed of how many tasks and what are the inputs and outputs (what will be the result of each assigned task to clients and how it'll be aggregated )?

2) How FAH is publicized in terms of BOINC?


Thanks in advance for your answer
Ali

[PantherX]

Welcome to the F@H Forum Ali,

1) If you want to know the basic Science behind F@H, then this site has a good overview -> http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science However, if you are interested in the Work Unit (WU) aspect only then this site has a very good explanation -> http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Runs,_Clones_and_Gens

[7im]

2) F@h doesn't use that. F@h writes their own clients for better performance. (Actually FAH developed their own client-server structure before BOINC existed and they've continued to refine it since then. BOINC, on the other hand, is a general purpose tool which can be both a benefit and a disadvantage, depending on your perspective. It certainly is useful for newer projects so they don't have to develop their own structure but lacks specific optimizations needed by projects that need serialized assignments or need very rapid returns.)