Folding@home

Folding@home (abbreviated FAH/F@H) is a computer program developed by Stanford University's Pande Laboratory that simulates protein folding to research cures for various diseases."About" - Folding@home
Volunteers from around the world have installed the software, which runs in the background off their device's unused resources to complete work units."Folding@home: Lessons From Eight Years of Volunteer Distributed Computing"
Work units are received from Stanford's servers that contain protein data and vary in size. Completing work units awards the person points that are publicly displayed on Folding@home's website.
==History==
In 2000 Stanford University had a single computer dedicated to researching cures for diseases through protein folding."History of Folding@Home". YouTube. August 14, 2007.
To speed up this process, Professor Vijay Pande and members of Pande's Laboratory proposed an idea of expanding it to a far larger number:
"Instead of waiting a million days on 1 computer to get the problem done, [we could finish] in 10 days on a hundred thousand computers."
The group began developing Folding@home that summer and released it in October, with between 5,000 and 10,000 people installing the program within a few months. By 2007 over 2 million computers had contributed to the project.
Stanford announced in 2006 that Folding@home would soon be available for the PlayStation 3, citing its powerful Cell processor."PS3 FAQ" - Folding@home"FAQ: How did the PlayStation 3 get involved?" - Folding@home"FAQ: Is there anything about the PlayStation 3 that makes it especially well-suited to the task, or could the project feasibly run on the Xbox 360 too? Do you have any plans to further expand the project?" - Folding@home"Week in video-game news: 'God of War II' storms the PS2; a PS3 research project". Associated Press. March 26, 2007. It was released in March 2007 as a standalone client, though it was later merged into Life with PlayStation in 2008. Over 15 million consoles spent more than 100 million computation hours donating to Folding@home during the 5 years it was available."Termination of Life with PlayStation®". PlayStation.com."Life with Playstation ending, FAH team continuing to look to push the envelope". Prof. Pande's blog. October 22, 2012.
Pande's Laboratory, Google and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology collaborated to build an in-browser client for Google Chrome, which was released in 2014."Adding a completely new way to fold, directly in the browser". Folding@home. February 24, 2014. This used Google's NaCl technology and was the only version of F@H to be entirely open sourced. It closed in 2019 after NaCL was deprecated."NaCl Web Client Shutdown Notice" - Folding@home
Pande's Laboratory also announced intentions to bring Folding@home to mobile platforms, with the first being released for Android devices in 2015."First full version of our Folding@Home client for Android Mobile phones". Folding@home. July 7, 2015.
==Team Jiggmin==
Main article: Team Jiggmin#Folding@home
Jiggmin announced the formation of a Folding@home group for the community in August 2008 with the team number "143016", setting it up on the 17th."Aug 17 - F@H". Jiggmin. 2008.
As of November 2016, Team Jiggmin's ranked 92 out of 225,558 groups and has folded a total of 1,382,551,122 points."Team Jiggmin Summary" - EXTREME Overclocking
===Prizes===
Prizes for Platform Racing 2 were added in October or November 2008 to increase participation, which are awarded once players fold a certain number of points for the team."Team Jiggmin" - Jiggmin's Village (October 2008 archive)"How to get a crown without modding or F@H!". Jiggmin's Village. November 21, 2008. The prizes and their required points are:
*1 - Rank token
*500 - Rank token
*1,000 - Rank token
*5,000 - Crown Hat
*100,000 - Cowboy Hat
*1,000,000 - Rank token
*10,000,000 - Rank token
Rank tokens were introduced in a 2013 Motley Monday update."Motley Monday ep.7 - Rank Tokens" - YouTube A "+3 rank" prize was given out prior for reaching 1,000 points."Prizes!". Jiggmin's Village. May 19, 2010. Players who received the "+3 rank" before its removal were automatically given 3 rank tokens in exchange.
+3 Rank PM.jpg|PM for receiving the now defunct +3 rank prize.
Crown PM.jpg|PM for receiving the Crown.
Epic Cowboy PM.png|PM for the short-lived drawing for an Epic Cowboy Hat in 2014.
==References==
Category:Projects
Category:Websites
Category:Platform Racing 2 Articles