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Folding@Home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness,[1] and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.[2] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[3]
Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis and other aggregation-related diseases. [2] More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range — a time scale thousands of times longer than it was previously thought possible to model.[4] The Pande Group goal is to refine and improve the MD and Folding@home DC methods to the level where it will become an essential tool for the MD research. [5] For that goal they collaborate with various scientific institutions. [6] As of December 13, 2007, fifty-four scientific research papers have been published using the project's work.[7] A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that Folding@home distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.[8]
On September 16, 2007, the Folding@Home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to do so, although it had briefly peaked above one petaFLOPS in March 2007.[9][10]. In comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world (as of November 2007, IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer) peaks at 478.2 teraFLOPS (1000 teraFLOPS=1 petaFLOP).
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 periodically 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. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.
PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3's Folding@Home client was made available on March 22, 2007.
Stanford announced in August 2006 that a folding client was available to run on the Sony PlayStation 3.[18] The intent was that gamers would be able to contribute to the project by merely "contributing electricity," leaving their PlayStation 3 consoles running the client while not playing games. PS3 firmware version 1.6 (released on Thursday, March 22, 2007) allows for Folding@home software, a 50 MB download, to be used on the PS3.[2] A peak output of the project at 990 teraFLOPS was achieved on 25 March, 2007, at which time the number of FLOPS from each PS3 as reported by Stanford fell, reducing the overall speed rating of those machines by 50%. This had the effect of bumping down the overall project speed to the mid 700 range and increasing the number of active PS3s required to achieve a petaFLOPS level to around 60,000. Lately, the console accounts for about 60% of all teraFLOPS. On April 25, 2007, Sony announced that a new version of Folding@home would be released the next day. The new version would improve folding performance beyond the current capacity, far beyond even the 400 teraFLOPS previously reached by PS3 users.[19] The release led to the breaking of the petaFLOPS barrier for the first time by any computing system in history on September 15, 2007. [20][21] Guinness World Record will recognize Folding@Home as the most powerful distributed computing network, in large part thanks to the PS3.[22]
On December 19, 2007, Sony again updated the Folding@Home client to version 1.3 to allow users to run music stored on their hard drives while contributing. Another feature of the 1.3 update allows users to automatically shut down their console after current work is done or after a limited period of time (for example 3 or 4 hours).[23][24] Also, the software update added the Generalized Born implicit solvent model, so the FAH PS3 client gained more broad computing capabilities.
