Interest in life elsewhere in the universe is so strong that SETI has attracted many more volunteers than originally anticipated, encouraging SETI administration to expand the frequency spectrum being studied. The folding process involves so many intramolecular interactions that to date only a handful of folding sequences have been successfully simulated by computer. By doing these folding simulations, we can understand which genes activate particular proteins and perhaps how to treat diseases that emanate from the dangerous and deadly ones. Simple proteins assemble in about 10,000 nanoseconds, and one 400-MHz computer can simulate 1 nanosecond of assembly time in about a day, Pande said. This means 1000 participants would be needed to simulate a simple protein fold in 10 days.
More complex proteins can take far longer.
Roland Clarkson, a student at California State University Dominguez Hills, discovered the 37th Mersenne prime number early in 1998. Tempering enthusiasm for this work is the warning that a 500-MHz PC will take a full year to test a single Mersenne exponent with only 1 chance in 250,000 of finding such a prime number. There's scarcely an area of science that doesn't need more computing power, so distributed computing is spreading rapidly into new areas. Working on the RC5-64 protocol, its assembled PCs can try out code keys at 105.11 gigakeys per second. This phenomenal rate is the main reason why this site, in January 2000, found the winning key in the CS-Cipher encryption contest.