Folding at home
Folding at home (or 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.
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), and cystic fibrosis. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range---a time scale thousands of times larger than were previously thought possible.
Many scientific research papers have been published using the project's work.[1]
Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its 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 small packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server.
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 home 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.
As of April 8, 2004, more than 140,000 CPUs were actively participating in Folding@home, with a total of over 850,000 CPUs registered with the project.Project significance
How it works