Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulation of protein folding, computational drug design, and other molecular dynamics for disease research. Folding@home is powered by the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers and PlayStation 3s from volunteers who have installed the software on these systems. The project primarily attempts to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, (the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure) and the reasons behind protein misfolding. This is of significant academic interest and has major implications for research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande laboratory at Stanford University, under the leadership of Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world in a collaboration known as the Folding@home Consortium.
The project uses statistical simulation methodology that represents a paradigm shift from traditional computational approaches. As part of the project's client-server architecture, the volunteered machines receive simulation Work Units, complete them, and return them to database servers where they are compiled into an overall simulation. Volunteers can track their contributions on the Folding@home website, which can make participation competitive and encourages long-term involvement. The project has pioneered the uses of GPUs, PlayStation 3s, and Message Passing Interface (used for computing on multi-core processors) for distributed computing and scientific research.
Folding@home remains one of the world's fastest computing systems, and currently operates at a computational performance nearly equal to all distributed computing projects under BOINC combined. The project is also the world's most powerful molecular dynamics simulator. This performance from its large-scale computing network has allowed researchers to run computationally expensive atomic-level simulations over biologically-relevant timescales thousands of times longer than previously achieved. Since its launch on October 1, 2000, the Pande lab has produced 100 scientific research papers as a direct result of the project. These simulations have demonstrated accuracy to observations in laboratory research: often considered a challenge in computational biology.
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