For some time now I have had machines at home and at work donating CPU cycles to the Sanford-based Folding@Home project. Folding@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project where your PC(s) runs models of protein formation ("folding") to further biomedical research.

One of the neat features of F@H's setup is the ability to create teams. I am pleased to report that both Team HouseOfHum.com and Team MHIS are in the top 5% of contributors.

In neither case am I running a supercomputer. At work I have two Xeon-based servers (NMS), a Core-2 server (NAS), and a pair of old PIII servers (DNS) plugging away. At home I have three VMs running F@H on my Core2-quad VMware host (the F@H client isn't SMP, so I need multiple VMs to take advantage of the multiple CPU cores), an instance on my P4 file server, and five old PIII warhorses crunching away. Nothing special -- just consistent application of moderate computing power. I get a bit of curmudgeonly glee over the fact that the piiiarmy (my user ID for all of those Pentium III machines) is nosing up to being in the top 12% of individual donors. They may be tortoises, but they're making a difference.