Folding@iD

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that seeks to understand protein folding at the molecular level. The idea behind the project is that computers only use around 10 percent of their CPU at a time, and that the remaining 90 percent could be used to do something useful. Basically, Folding@home is a lot of computers on the Internet crunching a lot of numbers and sending their results back to Stanford to help scientists better understand molecular dynamics.

But why doesn’t a supercomputer just work on it? Well, the idea behind distributed computing is assigning a large amount of work to a lot of computers so tasks are competed faster. In short, the hundreds of millions of computers on the Internet today are faster than any supercomputer.

Why should you install Folding@home? It doesn’t slow down your computer, can help the iD Folding@home team get up in the leaderboards, and actually does something productive with your CPU without slowing your computer down.

Download it and join team 181537 for the greater good of science!