Folding@Home Information

Introduction

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together donors who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. This page contains lots of useful Folding@Home Information.

Its initial focus was on protein folding but has shifted to more biomedical problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, COVID-19, and Ebola. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and are providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.

The project was started in October 2000 by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Professor Vijay Pande, who led the project until 2019. Folding@home is currently led by Dr. Greg Bowman of Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.

How Can I Help?

It’s easy! Simply download and install the Folding@home software on a machine that you own (or are paying for). There are separate versions of the software for Windows, macOS, and several Linux distributions. If you want credit for your work, you need to enter a name in the Change Identity screen. If you want to join the SQLFamily Team, simply enter our Team Number of 236388 in the same screen.

Finally, if you want to maximize your points, you need to get a Passkey from Folding@Home. Once they email you your Passkey, you need to enter it in the Change Identity screen. You can also enter all of your identity information in the FAHControl program. There is a support FAQ here.

SQLFamily Team

We have a SQLFamily Team (Team ID: 236388) composed of many people in the SQL Server community around the world. Anyone can join our team by using the 236388 team ID number in the FAH client. You can see our current statistics and rankings from the two links below: