We support Stanford’s Folding@Home

Sagacious Technologies is an avid supporter of the Folding@Home Project. A portion of sales goes to further support this project. Folding@home (sometimes abbreviated as FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University’s chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness, and one of the world’s largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.”

Purpose:

Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, mad cow disease, cancer, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases. More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range — a time scale thousands of times shorter than it was previously thought possible to model. The Pande Group goal is to refine and improve the MD and Folding@home DC methods to the level where it will become an essential tool for the MD research. For that goal they collaborate with various scientific institutions. As of February 19, 2009, sixty-three scientific research papers have been published using the project’s work. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that Folding@home distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.

If you wish to help donate, please contact us and we can provide advice on the best way to help the project.