Where is some info on this
The main source is direct here in the
forum
Folding@Home is a long running project from Stanford University utilising Distributed Computing methods to analyse mathematically why and how proteins "fold" in a certain way in 3-dimensional space. The home page of the project at Stanford you can find here:
http://folding.stanford.edu
Problem with those little protein is: when then fold in a different shape they don't work properly or even worst: mis-folded they can cause all kind of diseases like cancer, Alzheimer, ALS, ...
The basic idea is that one can run a little piece of software on the computer which get a working unit assigned; doing the required simulation. Technically the required software can use the CPU in your Apple; or also your GPU when running Windows or Linux.
Once this working unit is done and send back to Stanford you would get a certain amount of credits points assigned. You can't do anything with those point; they are just to recognise your individual contribution.
There are right now 170'000 volunteers participating and donating unused computer power to the project (some have severe dedicated system doing nothing else then folding; not really unused).
The donors often are organised in teams; like our team from MacRumors (#3446). Beside the interest in the science and the wish to support basic medical research there is also the aspect of "optimising" (same as "playing"
) with the computer and having some competitions between teams; but also sometimes inside a team. But important: always in a friendly way always having the scientific target in mind.
The current team stats (
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats) lists our team at rank #48; not too bad.
As mentioned last year the team achieved 1billion cumulated points over a loong period of time (I think around 12 years). With the increase of computational power (mainly by GPU) the same amount of scientific work can be done now in 12 month. Which is amazing.
So this time we push ourself to get the 2nd billion done very soon; heading for 3billion afterwards.
So; now I stop writing and give you the chance to ask further questions ...
happy to answer them all ...