What does Folding@Home do to help with disease research? How does it work?

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What does Folding@Home do to help with disease research? How does it work?

In: Biology

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Folding@Home is run by Stanford University who do medical research. To assist in their CPU-hungry calculations (most notably protein folding simulations) they ask average users to download their app which will use their CPUs and GPUs to help do that work. The number of users doing this varies, and since they started doing COVID-19 research (and since another project, seti@home, folded) there’s been a surge in interest in the project.

While some types of supercomputer workloads require all the machines to be in close proximity to each other with less-than-1-millisecond connectivity speeds, other types allow you to put your work into a queue, hand it out to random people on the internet, and collect the results a few hours later. Folding@home is in the latter category, so they’ve done exactly that.