| Sumario: | Part of a special section on technological innovation. An alternative to building an enormous supercomputer to discover how proteins fold is being researched by Vijay Pande and colleagues at Stanford University. The idea is based on the use of separate processor cycles on thousands of ordinary personal computers around the Internet. Pande and his colleagues have created a technique called “distributed dynamics,” in which each PC in a collective evaluates a different candidate pathway until one of them finds the key path to a more folded structure. Known as Folding@Home, it is already running, with about 10,000 PCs involved. The network has been used to fold some very small protein fragments, but there is no question of this project outpacing IBM's development of a supercomputer to decode proteins. Pande hopes that both efforts will serve to complement each other.
|
|---|