Folding@home facts for kids
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that helps doctors at Stanford University learn about and cure diseases. When parts of the human body do not work right, they make people sick. Folding@Home looks at the parts called proteins. When these proteins do not work right, they can make people sick with things like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease, and many types of cancer.
The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Instead of using an expensive supercomputer many user's computers can do the same work. The software was first available for the Sony PlayStation 3. It can also run in a Google Chrome window. It is now available for a wide variety of Android mobile devices.
Images for kids
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A protein before and after folding. It starts in an unstable random coil state and finishes in its native state conformation.
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Computing power of Folding@home and the fastest supercomputer from April 2004 to October 2012. Between June 2007 and June 2011, Folding@home (red) exceeded the performance of Top500's fastest supercomputer (black). However it was eclipsed by K computer in November 2011 and Blue Gene/Q in June 2012.
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Folding@home running on Fedora 25
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The PlayStation 3's Life With PlayStation client displayed a 3-D animation of the protein being folded
See also
In Spanish: Folding@home para niños
