Barbara Lamar <altamiratexas@earthlink.net> writes:
> This may already have been posted to the list, but in case not I'm sending
> it since there was some recent discussion of computer-power. URL is for a
> protein folding project being run by some people in the chem. dept at
> Stanford. Similar to the SETI project.
Nice coincidence, I installed folding@home
(http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/) yesterday and it
works nicely. It feels nice to help further biotech and nanotech this
way.
I'm attending a conference on simulation and visualisation in the life
sciences right now, and this morning Ajay K. Royyuru from IBM Watson
Research Center talked about their Blue Gene petaflop computer
project. If folding@home and similar systems could become more
widespread then we might not need the Blue Gene - although they would
of course have to compete with seti and cryptography. We computational
neuroscientists would of course gladly have the Blue Gene computer for
our runs, they do not work as well using the distributed approach.
Another tidbit I noted: the number of basepairs that can be sequenced
or synthetized together into strands per day and person appears to
increase superexponentially right now. I saw some plots comparing it
to Moore's law, and it was much more dramatic. After listening to
Craig Venter, I have the feeling that we should look for a biotech
singularity rather than a nanotech one :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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