FOLDING AT HOME

Leoville Folding@Home Team

Date of last work unit	2004-11-04 10:08:58
Active CPUs within 50 days	174
Team Id	35054
Grand Score	1323599.9 (certificate)
Work Unit Count	19574 (certificate)
Team Ranking (incl. aggregate)	113 of 34154
Home Page	http://www.leovilletownsquare.com
Fast Teampage URL	http://vspx27.stanford.edu/teamstats/team35054.html

Our goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases

What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease. What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

Results from Folding@Home simulations of villin See Prof. Pande's lecture on F@H at Xerox PARC

How can you help? You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed. One can also help by donating funds to the project, via Stanford University. What have we done so far? We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, Results section, or go directly to our press and papers page.

Since October 1, 2000, over 1,000,000 CPUs throughout the world have participated in Folding@Home. Each additional CPU gives us an added boost in performance, allowing us to tackle more difficult problems or solve existing research faster or more accurately.

Want to learn more? Click on the links on the left for downloads or more information. You can also download our Executive Summary, which is a PDF suitable for distribution.