What kind of name is Folding at Home?
Folding at Home refers to the process of Protein folding. The "at home" means that, well, you can run the application at home.

What is Folding at Home?
Folding at home is an application that assists in number-crunching for research about proteins.

How does it do that?
Every computer connected through Folding at Home donates a little bit of its energy towards processing information and solving complex problems.

What?
There are thousands of computers connected to Folding at Home at any given time. These computers each give a bit of information to one main computer. It's basically a bunch of regular computers combining their power and time to become one huge research supercomputer.

Can I run Folding at Home on something that isn't a computer?
Folding at Home can also run on the PS3 console. There have even been groups who leave their PS3 on for long periods of time while running Folding at Home.

What else does Folding at Home do?
Other than processing numbers, it shows you a nifty animation of a protein.

How do I run Folding at Home?
Folding at Home can be downloaded here. Simply install it, pick a username (and possibly a team), and run the program.

Username? Team?
Users can use a name to receive credit for the amount of information that their computers distribute. Groups of people can set up a team, although I'm not entirely sure how that works yet.

Get crunching and help learn about Alzheimer's, Mad Cow, CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and Cancer!

---

What the hell, I'm installing it now.

I don't see why I shouldn't.

---

Hmm... this seems like advertisement...

---

Oh, no. Roz always does the FAQ stuff for topics (the One Piece thread for example).

---

I just thought it was interesting, really.

I guess you could call it an advertisement, which also makes my One Piece thread an advertisement. And the WhatPulse thread an advertisement. And the last.FM thread an advertisement. And the ytmnd thread an advertisement. And that also makes basically every thread asking people to check something out or join a team an advertisement.

---

I've seen stuff like this before, literally years ago. Maybe 3, 5, 6 years ago.

---

Distributed computing is nothing new (SETI@Home, MJ-12). The fact that such an application is being bundled with a game console (PS3) is.

Besides, science is cool.

---

Yeah, I'm familiar with SETI@home as well, but as you mentioned, the PS3 compatibility is pretty cool.

---

I was running the PS3 version of it the other night. It's pretty neat, I have to admit. I'll probably let it run for a while this weekend, since I don't like to let game systems run without supervision.