Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. 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 S. Pande. Folding@home is one of the largest distributed computing projects.

How it works
Shortly after breaking the 200,000 active CPU count on September 20, 2005, the Folding@home project celebrated its fifth anniversary on October 1, 2005.
As of May 31, 2007 the peak speed of the project overall has reached over 1 PFLOPS.

Participation
There used to be cooperation between Folding@home and Google Labs. This came in the form of Google Compute. Google Compute supported Folding@home during its early stage — when Folding@home had ~10,000 active CPUs. At that time, a boost of 20,000 machines was very significant. Now, the Folding@home client is considerably more mature than it was 5 years ago, and the project has a large number of active CPUs. The number of new clients joining Google Compute was very low (most people opted for the Folding@home client instead) and so it didn't make sense to continue it. Also, the Google Compute clients had certain limits: they could only run the TINKER core, limited naming, and team options. Folding@home is no longer supported on Google Toolbar, and even the old Google Toolbar client will not work.

Google & Folding@home

High performance platforms

Graphical processing units
Stanford announced in August 2006 that a folding client will be available to run on the Sony PlayStation 3.

Multi-core processing client
A typical Folding@home user, running the client on a single PC, will likely not be ranked high on the list of contributors. However, if the user were to join a team, they would add the points they receive to a larger collective. Teams work by using the combined score of all their members. Thus, teams are ranked much higher than individual submitters. Rivalries between teams create friendly competition that benefits the folding community. Many teams publish their own stats, so members can have intra-team competitions for top spots. Teams offer no real benefits other than ones of self-gratification, and possibly extra contributions (to add to the teams rank).

Source code

Blue Gene
List of distributed computing projects