Folding@Home Project, You Can Help To Cure Disease

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to its goal.

Folding@home studies protein folding and misfolding. Proteins are biology's workhorses. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, is still a mystery.

When proteins do not fold correctly (misfold), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's - Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education.

All that is required is a computer running Windows, Linux Or Mac. If your computer can browse the internet it can run Folding@Home, there is also a new Playstation 3 Software, so you can even fold with your Playstation 3.

Simply download the folding@home software and run it on your PC. It runs in the background and only uses spare memory. It will not slow down your computer. If your someone that leaves your computer on alot you can choose to run Folding@Home as your screensaver.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user's choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client connects to a server to retrieve "work units", which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server.

So Why Not Just Use A SuperComputer?
Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not be possible by any other means. Even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer computing cycles than we do with the Folding@home cluster. This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.

What Are Proteins?
Proteins are necklaces of amino acids --- long chain molecules. Proteins are the basis of how biology gets things done. As enzymes, they are the driving force behind all of the biochemical reactions which make biology work. As structural elements, they are the main constituent of our bones, muscles, hair, skin and blood vessels. As antibodies, they recognize invading elements and allow the immune system to get rid of the unwanted invaders. For these reasons, scientists have sequenced the human genome -- the blueprint for all of the proteins in biology -- but how can we understand what these proteins do and how they work?

Why Do Proteins Fold?
However, only knowing this sequence tells us little about what the protein does and how it does it. In order to carry out their function (eg as enzymes or antibodies), they must take on a particular shape, also known as a "fold." Thus, proteins are truly amazing machines: before they do their work, they assemble themselves! This self-assembly is called "folding." One of our project goals is to simulate protein folding in order to understand how proteins fold so quickly and reliably, and to learn about what happens when this process goes awry (when proteins misfold).

Protein Folding and Disease: BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's and More
What happens if proteins don't fold correctly? Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. When proteins misfold, they can clump together ("aggregate"). These clumps can often gather in the brain, where they are believed to cause the symptoms of Mad Cow or Alzheimer's disease.

Why is protein folding so difficult to understand?
It's amazing that not only do proteins self-assemble -- fold -- but they do so amazingly quickly: some as fast as a millionth of a second. While this time is very fast on a person's timescale, it's remarkably long for computers to simulate. In fact, it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years! That's a long time to wait for one result!

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

To join a team, simply enter the team ID when you run Folding@Home.

Try the Folding@Home HomePage
For the full list of Diseases currently being studied, check out The Disease FAQ
Still got more questions? Try The Official FAQ
Or take a look at the Folding@Home Forums