Beberg's tools, which have just been commercially released, facilitate and coordinate processing between server and client computers. In this space-filling mode, filled spheres represent the approximate volume that the electrons occupy around each atom. The red bar typically takes one to two minutes to cross, so even brief runs of the screen saver yield useful results. Pande says that the group's initial approach aims to study protein's structural properties to understand the self-assembling dynamics. Their approach has focused on timing.
Proteins fold as quickly as a millionth of a second.
Although this is very fast on a human time scale, a thousand-fold gap exists between the simulation's nanosecond time scale and the microseconds of the fastest protein folds. Pande and his group's solution was to break the microsecond barrier using distributed dynamics. Now assume that she is blindfolded and that all her attempts to find the route are random. Given these parameters, it would likely take a long time for her to find the route. It takes something like a fluke to actually get over the mountaintop.