Join Professor Vijay S. Pande (Chemistry\, and by courtesy \, Structural Biology and Computer Science) as he details the general hi story and methodology behind the distributed computing model\, how this is a paradigm shift from the mainframe/supercomputer model\, and how the Folding@home project utilizes this novel technique.
\nUsing the C PU power and communications abilities of unattended desktop computers th roughout the world\, the Folding@home project studies protein folding an d misfolding. In this method of computer processing\, known as distribut ed computing\, different parts of a computer program run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a n etwork.
\nBy harnessing the power of many machines\, researchers a re able to analyze far more data than they might have been able to do so otherwise. Indeed\, Folding@home was the first machine to pass the peta flop scale and is now is at almost 10 petaflops in performance. The Fold ing @ Home project runs on any modern computer\, including Playstation 3 s\, and runs only when the computer is otherwise not being used.
\nThere will also be a live demo of StarCluster\, an open source cluster- computing toolkit for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You will als o learn about cloud based applications available to the campus\, such as Amazon and others.
URL:http://events.stanford.edu/events/326/32675 LOCATION:Turing Auditorium (Polya Hall\, Room 111) END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR