SETI@home is probably the most well known of the distributed computing projects. SETI's goal is to search for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence, by looking for radio signals from space. At the time of this writing, SETI@home’s total stats show that over 5 million participants have crunched 1.4 billion work units using nearly 2 million years of CPU time. All this has been accomplished since the project began in May of 1999. The latest statistics from the Folding@home project show that there have been nearly one million participants, of whom over 160,000 are still currently active.

More detailed information about distributed computing can be found here on the Folding@home website.

What is Folding@home?

The Folding@home project is a Distributed Computing effort to study the folding of proteins. Proteins are responsible for many functions at the cellular level. The project is studying the way proteins fold and misfold. A misfolded protein can cause such diseases as Cystic Fibrosis and Alzheimer’s. To make proteins, cellular machines known as ribosomes, string together amino acids into long linear chains. Like a rope, these chains loop about each other in a variety of ways (i.e., they fold). But, as with a tying a knot, only one of these many ways allows the protein to function properly. Yet lack of function is not always the worst scenario. For just as a hopelessly knotted rope can be worse than one that won't stay tied, too much of a misfolded protein could be worse than too little of a normally folded one. This is because misfolded proteins can clump together, if this happens within the brain the result can be BSE (Mad Cow Disease).

Although no treatments have yet been discovered from this research, within the coming decades it is certainly possible that a treatment to alleviate the suffering from Alzheimer’s, along with several other debilitating diseases, may be discovered.