Guide Note

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project in which a person donates their idle CPU time to Stanford University to perform complex computations to help simulate protein folding. The project is managed by Stanford University's chemistry department and currently holds the record for the most powerful computer cluster in the world.

Fast Facts

1. Author: Vijay Pande
2. Developer: Stanford University
3. Launched: October 1, 2000
4. Currently are several high performance clients
5. Genre: Distributed Computing
6. Runs in the background as the user does their normal work

Folding@Home is a distrbuted computing client which depends on other people to donate their idle CPU power to help simulate the complex computations to simulate protein folding. By participating you help speed up the project and help speed the research for the cure to common diseases that plague mankind.

In order to participate in the project you must download a piece of software provided by Stanford University and set it up to run on your computer. The client runs in the background taking idle CPU usage and folds proteins. After completing the work unit the computer sends the results back to Stanford University and you get another work unit to work on. For every work unit completed you get a certain amount of points for the work unit.

Folding@Home is a voluntary computing project, which means you do not directly get anything in return for having your computer run this software. However, by running this software you do get points and are able to compete with other people in the race to help find a cure.