Hitting the PlayStation 3 seems like it would be the peak of any app developer’s career.
That’s precisely what happened with Stanford University’s Folding@Home back in 2007.
The project’s name makes it sound like you’d get high scores for doing laundry (actually sort of a brilliant idea nowadays), but we’re talking a different kind of folding. The folding of proteins — and the diseases that arise when the folding goes haywire.
To crunch the data, F@H uses distributed computing — AKA the machines of an A-Team of volunteers who install its software.
As Ars Technica reported, the jump to the PS3 brought in 15m users. But the project’s PS3 run ended 5 years later, and in January, it was down to just 30k users.
… and Folding@Home went freakin’ WILD.
Its user base swelled to 400k in March, and added another 300k after that.
Teamwork really does make the dream work: The whole project is now more powerful than the top 500 supercomputers — combined. (!)
Because the project can help researchers understand the proteins on the coronavirus’s surface. It also helped that the recent end of another distributed-computing project — SETI@Home, which was all about hunting aliens — left people with processing power to spare.
Tracking down ET may be out of reach, but at this rate, understanding COVID-19 won’t be.