Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding.

It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande. Folding@home is now the second largest distributed computing project after SETI@home.

Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's Disease, cystic fibrosis and other aggregation related diseases. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range—a time scale thousands of times more accurate than was previously thought possible.

How it works

You can help by simply running a piece of software

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client runs in the background, and makes use of the CPU when it is not busy. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve "work units," which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.

The Folding@home client utilizes modified versions of four molecular simulation programs for calculation: Tinker, Gromacs, AMBER, and QMD.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

See also