Charitable Research Project

This year two A Level Computing students, James and Philip, are building a computer to enable Monmouth School to join the Folding@Home project.  James and Philip will design and make the case, source the internal components and construct the computer, then install and configure the software.

Folding@Home is an award winning, international charitable research project run by the University of Stanford. The Folding@Home project was set up many years ago to explore cures for degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntingdon’s and many others. However, the amount of calculations to model a cure that they need to do would take decades if they tried to do them all themselves. 

To resolve this, the Folding@Home project was started. This project allows people from around the world to run software to assist in the calculations, so banding together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world.  The project has already seen some successes, as shown in their peer reviewed results.

The University sends a work unit to the charitable computer which then performs the processing involved in executing the work, and sends the results back to the University. Each unit is sent to 3 different machines to reduce the chance of error.

The on-going processing of this computer running 24 hours a day uses somewhat less energy than a 60w light bulb. Stanford go to significant lengths too to secure the transfer of data and do not install any executable program files on the charitable computers, to minimize security issues. There will be scope for the involvement of Middle School students in the build. The student project leader, James, will also teach younger students about the maintenance of the project, so when he leaves school there will be other boys able to continue to look after it.

James, Philip and Mrs Hope are very grateful to the Old Monmothians for their donation, which has enabled the project to take place.