Jim Clark has been a major donor to Stanford and his great contributions has had a huge impact on my group's work in general and on Folding@home in particular. Jim Clark was a professor of CS at Stanford, but subsequently was involved in many successful major Silicon Valley companies (see his wikipedia page for all the details). He also donated over $100M to Stanford to build the Clark Center, a University-wide center for interdisciplinary biology.
Today, Dr. Clark along with John Hennessy (the President of Stanford University) visited our offices to hear about our recent work. They both were heavily involved in computer architecture in the past, so they were interested to hear about our work with GPUs and the success we are seeing there (in particular, the significant speed increases). Also, they are both interested in neuroscience and so I was excited to tell them about our recent Alzheimer's work.
Anyway, I was excited to give them both an update and some idea of where we're going, and it was great fun for me to tell them all about how much we've done.