“Protein folding” is not a new concept – this refers to the way our bodies proteins fold into different forms that correspond to different body parts. A mistake in this folding process actually contributes to diseases and bodily malfunctions like Alzheimer’s, so it unlocking the secrets in this folding process is key to medical professionals and scientists providing cures and solutions for said diseases. But where does your Sony Xperia phone come in?
Folding@Home was an effort to distribute the computing load in simulating the folding process – the “slowest” proteins fold in a few milliseconds, so one can imagine the computing power needed to simulate this. Folding@Home has been around for a while, helping a team at Stanford University to look into the process and where it goes wrong. The effort has used the distributed computing powers of home computers, even idling desktop GPUs, PlayStation 3 units, and a whole lot more. As a result of the data gathered, the Folding@Home team has published papers leading to major advances in medicine.
Can your Sony Xperia phone help in this effort? Say for example, contribute to the folding process while you’re asleep and your phone is charging? It just might work. A typical Sony Xperia phone would be able to contribute an average 30 GFLOPs of computing power. The world record for distributed computing was “1 Petaflop” – achieved in 2012 when PlayStation 3’s contributed to Folding@Home.
A new Folding@Home app – still in its beta version – is available at the Google Play Store for all Xperia Z series smartphones, as well as the Xperia T3, T2 Ultra, M2 Aqua and C3 to contribute to this effort. It will take around 50,000 smartphones to equal that world record, but think about this – in order to achieve a data breakthrough, the Folding@Home team needs 150,000 days of computing from one phone. Split that load to 10,000 phones and the time drops to just around 2 weeks. What more if there were more than 10,000 Xperia phones contributing to this?
Do something cool for the world. If you own an Xperia model mentioned above, get the app and help out.
DOWNLOAD: Google Play Store
