Folding@HOME - (description on
WikiPedia) Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. 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. F@H is one of the largest distributed computing projects.[1] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[2]
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. [2] More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the F@H project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range — a time scale thousands of times longer than was previously thought possible.[3]
As of March 30, 2007, forty-nine scientific research papers have been published using the project's work.[4] A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that F@H distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.[5]
