About This Site
Atlas Folding is a blog about the construction and maintenance of a nVidia GPU based super-computing system named “Atlas Folder” which is dedicated to running Stanford University’s Folding@home . Atlas Folding is also a blog about my motives for doing such a thing as well as my thoughts on life affected by Huntington’s Disease. I hope also to convince the readers here of the value and simplicity of running Folding@home themselves on their own computers.
The Atlas Folder computer is being designed and built by me, Jason Farqué, with great assistance and resources being dedicated by my family and our family business started by my parents in 1982. My family is my father Tony Farqué, my mother Verne Farqué, my brother Eric Farqué and his wife Leslie Mansfield. Atlas Folder’s folding points are contributed to the HUNT-DIS (Huntington’s Disease) team #36167.
My brilliant father Tony and his equally brilliant brother Greg have advanced Huntington’s Disease which they inherited from their mother. I myself have taken the test for the disease and am negative for the gene.
I quite literally won a genetic coin toss, and having won the same coin toss that my father and uncle lost fills me with conflicting emotions; I vacillate between feelings of relief, helplessness, and self-disgust. Relief for never having to face what they face, helplessness at not being able to do anything significant to ease their suffering and restore their vitality, and self-disgust at the selfishness of feeling relieved.
Building Atlas Folder then is therapeutic for me. While it almost certainly will never directly help my father or uncle, it can help others as yet unborn that might suffer the same fate or the fate of some other genetic disease. This project and this blog then are very much about my coping with my not having Huntington’s Disease and what steps I can take as a healthy individual to contribute meaningfully in the name of my father and to justify my winning coin toss.
Jason Farqué
