Brunei's Local News - Brudirect.com

Bandar Seri Begawan – A local gaming community site, Bruneian Garners Online (Brugamers.com), has joined other web communities in its bid to fight against cancer through Folding@home research programmed.

The programmed utilizes the cell processor in Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) to achieve performance on par with supercomputers and acquiring knowledge of folding and folding-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer.

"It started with the PC screensaver. PS3 helped increase it as a mandatory update. In less than a year, PS3 recorded tops, beating PC," said Mohammad Syafiq Hj Abu Bakar, Brugamers.com site administrator.

He added that he created the team to show that garners are not just for children anymore but mature, responsible adults who would help others.

"It is also to show the world and put Brunei on the health map. Most importantly, help research cancer as a gamer," he said.

Additionally, it was also to show that game devices, not just the gamer, has matured and "can do more than just being an entertainment system," he said.

Through the programmed, garners are able to contribute to the project by leaving the PS3 consoles running the client while not playing games. Only users with P53 firmware version 1.6 and above are able to run the 50MB Folding@home software.

Bruneians, who own PS3 consoles and have Internet connectivity interested to join the research programmed can register through the Life with Playstation at the Network icon in their console's dashboard, select the current channel, choose an identity, join an existing team and enter the team's number. The Brugamers' team number is 149085.

About one million PS3 consoles are participating in the Folding@home programmed which supports Remote Play for Playstation Portable (PSP), a 3D model of the protein being simulated and plays music in the background.

The programmed also has a screensaver mode activated via the Settings menu in the Folding@home application, allowing PS3 users to consume slightly less power and to increase performance of protein-folding simulations.

Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they assemble themselves, or "fold". While the process of protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, most of the findings are still scarce. When proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), serious consequences including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndrome.

It gathers people from throughout the world to download and run software to form one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

It is later used to simulate challenging problems collectively rather than simply running a piece of software.

The programmed is run by the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department, a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education, works on theory and simulations of how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold. -- Courtesy of The Brunei Times