What is Folding@Home?
Folding@Home is a project run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University’s Chemistry Department), which is a non-profit institution dedicated to science research and education. PROJECT GOALS: Solving the protein folding problem Understanding how proteins self-assemble (“protein folding”) is a holy grail of modern molecular biophysics. What makes it such a great challenge is its complexity, which renders simulations of folding extremely computationally demanding and difficult to understand. (See Scientific Background for more details about what are proteins, why do they fold, why this is so difficult, and why do we care). Our group has developed a new way to simulate protein folding (“distributed dynamics”) which should remove the previous barriers to simulating protein folding. However, this method is extremely computationally demanding and we need your help (see below). We have already demonstrated that our distributed dynamics technique can fold
Folding@home is a feature under Network on the PS3 Home Menu. It is a distributed computing project that is run by Stanford University. The goal of the project is to research protein folding mechanisms in the hope that this will lead to medical treatments for related diseases. You can help out by allowing Stanford University to use your PS3 when is it idle. The power of the PS3 means you contribute a significant amount of CPU time to the project. More information can be found at http://folding.stanford.edu/.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that is run by the Pandegroup at Stanford University. Their goal is to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases. What are proteins and why do they “fold”? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease. For a protein to fold or misfold takes very little time, but it is hugely complicated. Analyses of the folding of even the simplest of proteins requires significant super computing power. The amount of computing power required to perform these gargantuan calculations and to com
