Emerald Data Solutions Funds Student Programming Club's Leading Efforts in Stanford Project

Dec. 22, 2010 - PRLog -- The Park City High School (PCHS) Programming Club is leading national efforts among online protein folding teams to help find cures for diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers. New funding received through the Park City Education Foundation will enable members to build two new computers, which will help the students further increase the school’s project ranking.

“Many members of the Programming Club realized the importance of pursuing this endeavor, and we approached the Park City Education Foundation with a request for grant money,” said FCHS student and Club member Matthew Monahan. “Through the Foundation, the Club recently received new funding that has made our most ambitious project to date possible.”

Club members are collaborating with researchers in Stanford University’s Folding@Home distributed computing project, which utilizes the computing horsepower of graphics processing units and idle computers worldwide to help find cures for life-threatening diseases. The Folding@Home project, also known as F@H or FAH, is a worldwide effort to understand how proteins assemble themselves.

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly there can be serious long-term effects.

Folding@Home studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Standford researchers use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed the institute to simulate folding for the first time and direct their approach to examine folding-related diseases.

The PCHS Programming Club has successfully become one of the highest rated groups for assisting in this project. The new computers will essentially become part of a global supercomputer, and the project provides the members valuable information in the design and construction of cost-effective computers that can help Stanford in this important work.

Through the Park City Education Foundation, local technology company Emerald Data Solutions provided the additional funding for the project.

Abby McNulty, Executive Director of the Park City Education Foundation commented: “We are pleased to work Emerald Data Solutions to make a meaningful investment in a program that not only benefits Park City High School students, but also the community at large.”

Folding@Home is based at Stanford University and Stanford University Medical School and is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. For more information, visit http://folding.stanford.edu/.

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