The Folding@Home project has been running for several years. How did it begin?
In 1999, I started my position a professor at Stanford University, heading a research group. In order to push the envelope on what could be accomplished by my research group, it became clear that we would need to make a major push in computational power to perform our research of interest. One of the first challenges was to develop a way to efficiently use distributed computing for our research. Not all problems are well-suited to distributed computing and ours was on the surface, not particularly well suited. However, after the development of novel algorithms, we discovered a technique which allowed for distributed computing to make significant advances in what we do.
