Folding@Home and Genome@Home: Using distributed computing to tackle previously intractable problems in computational biology

Understand

For decades, researchers have been applying computer simulation to address problems in biology.

• However, many of these "grand challenges" in computational biology, such as simulating how proteins fold, remained unsolved due to their great complexity.
• Indeed, even to simulate the fastest folding protein would require decades on the fastest modern CPUs.
• Here, we review novel methods to fundamentally speed such previously intractable problems using a new computational paradigm: distributed computing.