Folding at Home, a good lead that the garage lab can follow

Folding@Home is a project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. The project was initialed by Stanford University. The main goal is to research the diseases caused by protein misfolding using distributed computing. what stanford doing here is not using some super computers or cluster machines to do the large computing and simulations. Instead, it releases Folding@Home client that can runs on individual PC background. What client does is silently using your unused cpu to collect data from server and perform calculations.
Everybody who has PC box or PS3 can download it and run it on your pc as screensaver. I will call it a smart way to build up a super cluster without spending much money buying machines. Because thousands of people involved, it really helps speed up solving protein misfolding mystery in order to find cure for some diseases.



Ideally, Folding@Home provides a platform that people can work together just through internet and don't even need to know the knowledge of protein or whatsoever. That contribution is much more than any single research center or institute can offer. What if we apply this method to our economic society. Change the way we collaborate without seeing each other or knowing each other. What will it be like?

I believe more will follow.

Download client