For those who don't know what FAH is: http://folding.stanford.edu What happens if proteins don't fold correctly? Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. When proteins misfold, then can clump together ("aggregate"). These clumps can often gather in the brain, where it is believed to cause the symptoms of Mad Cow or Alzheimer's disease. So the thing is that you might have computers running Linux with processors that sit idle most of the time. As a matter of fact very few computers are actually more busy than idle, if we're considering processor time. You can donate the idle processor time to this scientific research. So you could ssh into those machines and run FAH there. But the problem with this method is that you need to keep an instance of bash on your computer, and one on the remote one, consuming RAM unnecessarily. Here is a method to run only FAH on a remote machine. It applies if you have shell there but not root. Consult with root person to see if it's allowed to run FAH. Note that FAH has the highest nice value of 19, which means lowest priority of all programs, so it shouldn't be noticed as slowing the computer down. It works by using ssh with key pairs. If you don't know how that can be done, here are the steps: 1. Generate your key pair: ssh-keygen -f myname -t dsa You will get two files: myname (private key) and myname.pub (public key) 2. Copy the public key (contents of myname.pub) to this file: remotemachine:/home/username/.ssh/authorized_keys 3. Copy the private key (contents of myname) to this file: localmachine:/home/username/.ssh/id_dsa You should be careful with this file, don't make it world readable. Treat it like the house or car keys, because that's what it is. Anyone who has a copy of it gains access to those machines that have your public key in the authorized_keys file. On the remote computer, create a directory /home/username/fah and download there http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/release/FAH4Console-Linux.exe and run it to configure it. After it started computing, you can interrupt it [Ctrl+C] and logout. Then you can issue this on your local machine: ssh remotemachine "cd fah && ./FAH4Console-Linux.exe" This connects to the remote computer, runs the commands between quotes and displays the output on the local console. If you press [Ctrl+C] now, FAH will continue running on the remote machine. Leave it running. It has a text log that you can read, if you need to. If you have a larger number of machines, here is a script to check on them from time to time to see if they're still running FAH: for SERVER in servername1 servername2 \ servername3 servername_aso whatserverhaveyou ; do echo -n Checking $SERVER: ssh $SERVER ps -A | grep FAH4 > /dev/null ; if [ ! $? ]; then echo FAH not running ; else echo -e "\t\tok" ; fi # above is one long line, it get wrapped by the mail client done In case you have root on the remote machines you could run FAH as a service. I'll make a script and post it when it's ready.