Help Cure Alzheimers.... while you sleep?

[Cleoriff]

I am all for medical innovation as you know....but I read this article with absolute amazement...

The headline is.......

Folding@Home Beta arrives for Sony smartphones, help cure Alzheimer’s while you sleep

(at first I thought it was a wind up)

I do not profess any great technological knowledge of how it may work... but stand in awe of those scientists who are convinced it will....

Sony has a long standing partnership with the Folding@Home research project and has just released a Beta version of Folding@Home for smartphones, following successful trials back in 2012.

http://www.androidauthority.com/folding-home-beta-sony-xperia-579844/

Read it and be amazed. If this helps people suffering with Alzheimers...an absolutely terrible degenerative disease of the brain...then it really does show how medical innovations can be used in conjunction with other technology.

[Bambino]

In all honesty, I didn't understand that article at all, but it was interesting. 

[Cleoriff]

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@Bambino wrote:

In all honesty, I didn't understand that article at all, but it was interesting. 

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It was the Cure for Alzheimers that initially caught my attention @Bambino  and then when I read it...I did understand this

"The Folding@Home project is designed and used for disease research. By simulating protein folding and drug design, researchers can obtain a better look at difficult to observe molecules, which could help find cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease, among others."

It was this part that (being a technophobe) I couldn't compute...(No pun intended)

"It’s essentially a scientific simulation program that makes use of the combined processing capabilities of computers, and now smartphones, from all over the world to cost effectively crowd-source research data that would otherwise only be obtainable through the use of hugely expensive supercomputers. Each peer chips in a small amount of processing power, but it adds up when you combine the entire user base together."

I was just hoping that some computer whiz ( such as @viridis ) would rock up and link the two together for me

[viridis]

I'll try to explain as best I can.
Proteins naturally "fold" and when an error in the folding occurs, it leads to very serious situations medically.
Now, to try to understand why the failures occur, a research laboratory will set an exact simulation running that takes a MASSIVE amount of processing power to run.
Now, no regular computer has the power to run the simulation fully as they just don't have anywhere near enough power to simulate the hundreds of thousands of tasks in the hundreds of thousands of jobs in the millions of sets.. Etc etc.
Step up folding @home.
It takes the donated cpu resources provided by members and links them all together in thousands of groups to form multiple super computing units to perform the simulations without even denting a single cpu.
Sony teamed up with stanford university at the launch of the playstation 3 and have users the option of allowing idle CELL cores to be donated to the scheme.
This allowed Folding@Home to pass the 5 native petaFLOP mark, of which 767 teraFLOPS are supplied by PlayStation 3s.
By introducing the Xperias to the mix the native computing power as well as userbase will increase dramatically.
Best bit is, the resources will only be used when device is plugged in and reaches 100% so as not to use battery power at all.

[viridis]

Folding simulation running on playstation 3

[viridis]

[Cleoriff]

Ok...so I know all about protein folding and that errors occur creating medical (and genetic problems)

So if I understand this.... Folding@Home have linked with Stanford Uni and Sony.

The latter two have donated loads and loads of computer CPU's to run these massive research simulations

(otherwise there is no way this research could continue without them...?

I need manageable chunks of info to absorb......:smileywink:

[Cleoriff]

See ...while I was asking for my basic level computer lesson...you went and posted pictures...Brilliant I might add...but my brain is scrambling with the practicalities....:smileywink:

[viridis]

It was set up by the lab at stanford and uses user donated personal computers, playstation 3's and now smartphones.
All while sitting in the users home idly doing work together.

[viridis]

I shall report back in morning, the app is already available as a beta for Xperia Z range users.