Once you know what the shape is, you can guess at what it does. Their structure tells us a lot of what they do and how they put themselves together. Thus, with 1000 processors, they can break the microsecond barrier and unlock the mystery of how proteins fold . As reported by Wired article, simple proteins assemble in about 10,000 nanoseconds, and one 400MHz computer can simulate 1 nanosecond of assembly time in about a day, Pande said. This means 1,000 participants would be needed to simulate a simple protein fold in 10 days, and that's just for simple folds.
More complex proteins can take far longer.
However, this method is extremely computationally demanding and we need your help . We have already demonstrated that our distributed dynamics technique can fold small protein fragments and protein-like synthetic polymers. The next step is to apply these methods to larger, considerably more important and complicated proteins. Unfortunately, larger proteins fold slower and thus we need more computers to simulate their folding. Thus, while 10-100 processors were enough to simulate the helix, we will need many more to simulate these larger, more interesting proteins.