Fold with me!

Folding at home is a great way to help science expand to find brand new ways to help humanity. It’s a project of Stanford University, and been around since 2000.  Long story short, you install a client software package on your PC that uses your unused CPU cycles to run protein folding equations.  This lets hundreds of thousands of computers from around the world all work together to discover how diseases work, and how to beat them!

So, what does this have to do with Exchange? Two things.

1 – I have a team on Folding @Home.  If you use team number 171744 after you install, you’ll be joining up on TalontedTweeple.

2 – For years now, virus attacks have leveraged Exchange Server to proliferate malicious software that creates a huge network of corrupted computers to act as a giant attack grid.  It’s nice to be able to use the same theory (grid computing) to do something good for the world instead.

These guys have been running the program for nine years now, and you can see on their website all of the things the research projects that use Folding @Home have accomplished.  This is a great way to let your PC work for the world when you’re not actively using it.  The software can be tweaked to contain what it is allowed to do and not do, and is very well behaved. 

Let’s face it, you’re using power every moment that your PC is running – even if you’re not using it – so why not let it do some work while you’re not around? Even if you don’t want to join my team, you can join teams for Google, IBM, or dozens of other companies and organizations.  No matter what team you join (even no team at all), everyone is working toward the same goal.