"Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."

GotFrag is proud to announce the creation of our very own Folding@Home team! For those that don't know what the Folding@Home project is all about, read on. If you do, skip to the bottom to get our team info to start folding away!

Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande.

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly ("misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including 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.

How can you help combat cancer? You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project - people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range — a time scale thousands of times larger than was previously thought possible.

So in essense, everyone on the team is playing doctor! What is great about Folding@Home is the fact that PlayStation 3 owners will also be able to contribute to the project. Whenever you aren't using your PC, Mac, Linux box or PS3, Folding@Home will activate and start crunching numbers and helping out the project.

We urge anyone and everyone who has CPU cycles to spare to help out in this good cause and join the GotFrag.com team!
To get started visit the download page on the official Folding@Home website. There you can decide what type of client (console, graphical, or screensaver) to run and in choosing a user name. Personally we recommend either the screensaver or the console client. With the console client, you can ran 2 Folding@Home clients if you have a dual-core machine for even more folding computation goodness.

Quick Installation Guide for the Console client:

1. Download the console version from the link below.
2. Create a folder where the client will reside by itself free from other programs and files. If you have a dual core system, you'll want to have 2 different folders with 2 separate clients. This is because in the advanced options you have to set the machine ID for each client. One core will be machine ID 1 and the other client will be machine ID 2. This is how you can use both cores on your processor to their fullest potential.
3. Regardless, once you've made that folder, run the Folding@Home executable for the first time. If you messed up your user name or some other setting while doing this, all you have to do is delete all the files in the folder except the Folding@Home executable and you can start over.
4. In the images below I've made clear what options you should use when configuring your Folding@Home client. There are specific questions for Laptop and Dual-Core users, so make sure you pay attention, and if you stick to the options I set below, you should be good to go. Next time you restart your computer, the Folding@Home client will be invisible to you unless you check your myFolding.html page that is created whenever you start folding on your computer (this html file will be in the Folding@Home folder you created)
5. You can also check if everything is functioning correctly if you press CTRL+ALT+DEL and your CPU is running at 100%. Don't worry, whenever you run Counter-Strike 1.6 or any other game or program on your computer, Folding@Home is designed to instantly throttle down and be non-intrusive and not interfere at all with any day to day activities. This is the great thing about Folding@Home that lets users really go on with their daily e-lives all while letting their spare CPU cycles compute for a great cause.

Quick Installation Guide for the Graphical client:

1. Download the graphical version from the link below.
2. Run the Folding@Home installer.
3. Go through all the install jargon, and when you're done installing, run Folding@Home for the first time if it hasn't already.
4. Below you'll see example of the Folding@Home control panel, this is the key part where your contribution is recognized and where you can join the GotFrag.com team. Just make sure to enter a unique username and set the team number to 51843. As a clear example, you can see I entered in my name below and the team number for GotFrag.
5. The advantage of the graphical client is that it installs a system tray icon where you can pause, stop or kill the Folding@Home process just incase you need to stop it for any reason. Even though it is designed to instantly throttle down whenever you are using the computer at all, you may want to do this incase you want to check a computer problem or give yourself some piece of mind that Folding@Home won't interfere with your game/scrim.

Once you have successfully done that, you've officially joined GotFrag.com Folding@Home team! With the massive and loyal community GotFrag.com has had over the years, we believe together everyone at GotFrag can make a huge dent in the fight against disease and cancer and help GotFrag become a forefront name in in the Folding@Home project.

With that said, GotFrag would like to help boost this great cause by giving away something a little special as an extra incentive to join in on the Folding@Home fun. Over the years, you, the loyal GotFrag readers have supported GotFrag and for that we can't thank you enough for making us the #1 eSports site on the planet. However what we will be doing is giving out an Icemat Siberia Headset (with USB) to the first individual who can reach 50,000 points in GotFrag.com's name!

Yes, you read right, we are giving away this lovely headset to the first person who can reach 50,000 points for the GotFrag.com team. Now remember, you aren't limited to only one computer, you can install Folding@Home on multiple computers with an internet connection. So get folding! To check up on the team's progress you can visit the official team page link below and whenever you install the client, you can check up on your own progress by simply visiting your own user page. We will announce the winner of this contest whenever the first person crosses 50,000 point mark, so hurry!

UPDATE: We announced this contest without introducing some ground rules, silly us. Due to the nature of the stats page on the folding website, there is no way for us to know which team member is who. Therefore, we request that you make your folding name identical to your GotFrag name if possible. If your GotFrag name is already taken, please add a "GF" to the back of your name. This way we will be able to confirm the identity of the first folder to get to 50,000 points. We realize that many of you have already started folding (thank you!). In this case, please write your folding name down in a comment to this story so we can keep a record of who is who. Finally, GotFrag staff, as much as we love you, you are not eligible for this prize.

Folding@Home
Folding@Home Client Download and Username Check
Folding@Home GotFrag.com Team # 51843