Folding@Home is a distributed computing project designed to perform simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics, as well as improved methods for doing so. Also known as FAH or F@H, it first tries to determine how proteins reach their final structure, which has considerable scientific interest and is of great importance for the study of Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, cancer and many other ailments.
To a lesser extent, Folding@Home and tries to predict what the final structure and to determine how other molecules can interact with it, which is used in medicines. Folding@Home is designed and operated by Pande lab Stanford University, led by Vijay Pande. The project is dedicated to the understanding of protein folding, the diseases that are the result of misfolding and the development of new computational methods for drug development.
Folding@Home runs on idle processing resources of thousands of volunteer PCs and PlayStation 3. Completed work units of those systems back to the database servers and have made a total of modeling. Volunteers will be rewarded for their contributions to the credit points that may make participation more competitive. The project is the first time the use of GPU, PlayStation 3 seconds, and the Message Passing Interface for distributed computing and scientific research. This global network of computers allowed the Folding@Home to simulate protein folding to date, thousands of times greater than previously achieved.