Folding@home

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that helps doctors at Stanford University learn about and cure diseases.^[1] When parts of the human body do not work right, they make people sick. Folding@Home looks at the parts called proteins. When these proteins do not work right, they can make people sick with things like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease, and many types of cancer.^[1]

Folding@Home application screen

Folding@Home became more popular for a time during the COVID-19 pandemic and many personal computers had their folding@home Client set to fight the COVID disease.

The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers around the world owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Instead of using an expensive supercomputer many user's computers can do the same work. The software was first available for the Sony PlayStation 3.^[2] It can also run in a Google Chrome window.^[2] It is now available for a wide variety of Android mobile devices.^[2]