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PlayStation Home (also marketed and referred to simply as Home )[2] is a community-based service for the PlayStation Network which has been in development since early 2005. Home allows users to create an avatar for their PlayStation 3 console. This avatar will get their own virtual apartment space, which can then be adorned with items users can receive in several different ways. In the future the service will also expand, allowing players to have more sorts of clothing or bigger apartments. Sony wants to give people the tools to create their own things, but they also want a safe place for younger users to feel comfortable.[3]Sony is aiming for the initial download to be under 500MB. Home was announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 7, 2007[4] and was originally scheduled for a global public release in September or October 2007.[5]

During the Tokyo Game Show 2007, Home's full release was announced to be delayed until "Spring 2008".[6] On 21 April 2008 Sony Computer Entertainment announced that Home would be delayed further and the closed beta would be extended until "Fall 2008".[7] However it was confirmed that more PlayStation Network users would be invited to join the closed beta during this time. An announcement on the Official PlayStation Europe user forum confirms that invitations to the closed beta will be offered to winners of a weekly Warhawk online gaming event.[8] Kazuo Hirai, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said that "Spending more time on the development and on the Closed Beta testing reaffirms our commitment to bringing a quality service, maintaining the PlayStation tradition."

PlayStation Home started as "The Getaway Online" for the PlayStation 2. However, this project was never completed before release of the PS3, at which point the developers began porting code to the new platform. Phil Harrison, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, liked the idea of having a virtual 3D community hub for PlayStation gamers, and transferred the project to be PlayStation Home. [9] However, the project was kept under high secrecy.

An online-based service had been the subject of speculation since the launch of the PlayStation Network. Sony had expressed interest in such a system, specifically the achievements, for first-party titles, though they never released any specific information regarding it.[10]

PlayStation Home, as a feature, was first publically mentioned in an interview with NG-Gamer,[11] detailed by Kotaku [12] and finally confirmed by NG-Gamer.[13] It was officially announced by Phil Harrison on Wednesday March 7, 2007, during his keynote speech at the 2007 Game Developers Conference.

Photographs and video released by Sony show Home users meeting in a plaza/town square type of area. They also show users in their own apartments with their own choice of decor and furnishings. Users can also invite other users to their apartments.

In the world outside of the player houses, players can meet and chat with other community-members. One can invite their friends, hang out and communicate via voice chat, or normal text chat, listen to music, play a game or exchange content. People who enter each other's "home" (called a "HomeSpace") can stream the host's music and videos from their HDD. Videos are viewed via virtual Sony TVs, such as the BRAVIA. Photographs can be viewed via a virtual picture frame.

Every user has a private apartment space that they can modify and change over time. The basic apartment is free and will offer users lots of options for customization and personalization. In the future, Sony will provide tools that will enable users to have an even greater ability to create their own Home spaces and content.

At time of release, the user's "home" will be streamed from their own PlayStation 3, meaning that if the user logs out of Home, then access to this user's apartment no longer exists until the user logs on again. According to Sony, they are looking for new ways to get around this issue.

The world of PlayStation Home will not only consist of players' houses, but there will also be arcade-games that can be played, as well as games like pool billiards and bowling.

The look of the avatar, decorations, where to travel, settings, etc. can be controlled on a virtual PlayStation Portable. Sony has said it will be strict on spamming of the Home system. They have told gaming website GameSpot that they will be able to block a user's console and IP address so that they cannot connect to the service.[14]

In time, Home will play host to many types of events such as exclusive game previews and developer interviews. It will be organized by Home and its affiliated content providers. Live events such as sports and concerts may also be broadcast within Home. These will all be pre-paid using the Sony Wallet System.

Home will also contain a virtual cinema which will screen films that have been released on DVD/Blu-ray,[15][16], the seating areas containing other Home users will be seen and the screen is viewable [17] there will be an option to select full screen mode so the content playing will appear the same as any other video, DVD, or Blu-ray played from the PS3 System.

In addition to the main public areas offered by Sony and the personal apartment area, many game developers will open their own spaces showcasing their products, developers that have created spaces for home include; EA, Activision, SEGA, Ubisoft, Rockstar Games and THQ. Inidual games will also be allowed their own space.

In the future areas can be developed by major companies outside of gaming. The then Executive Vice President of SCEE, Phil Harrison stated that locations built around famous coffee companies, famous drinks companies, clothing companies, record companies, major retailers and so on could feature depending on whether these companies felt it worthwhile to create something for Home.

There will be a 'Hall of Fame' which will include a Trophy Room. The Trophy Room is a Home Space where users are able to display their gaming accomplishments. Players will be able to earn Trophies when they play games that support the Trophy system. The more Trophies a player has dictates which games they own and how skilled a player they are. Publishers and developers will be able to support Trophies by building them into their games' architecture, and existing games may be updated with patches to support it, as evidenced with .

There will be at least four ways to communicate with other users in the environment. Users will be able to type on the virtual keyboard, a USB or Bluetooth keyboard, talk using a USB or Bluetooth headset, and use e-motions, which are movements such as waves or a dance. These e-motions are based on emoticons. For convenience, there is also a library of textual messages to choose from via the controller or keyboard, such as "Hi" or "How to do.. ".

PlayStation Home will feature updates that expand the social and gameplay aspects of Home. The closed beta has received an update from Sony that have given the users the ability to access their patio and upload photos inside their virtual space.[18] Another feature of the update is a purple and blue building outside in Home Square was recently opened to reveal the Home Marketplace. Other features, such as the much speculated monorail transport system as well as Home Trophies, have yet to be released to the beta testers. Sony will, in the future, release more updates to expand PlayStation Home into a larger, more interactive world. Phil Harrison said that in the future pets and more robust clothing will be available on the service.

Although the service itself will be free of charge, content will be available on the PlayStation Store, such as clothes, furniture and game specific accessories, which can be purchased, but some might be available free of charge. Content can also be unlocked on specific games. Larger apartments can be purchased that come with games such as billiards or a swimming pool.[19][20]

Advertising will be a big part of Home, and Sony expects retailers to create their own lobbies and deploy them for commercial purposes. At first, Sony will stream advertising from their own Home servers. Later, other companies will be allowed to insert their own ads into the network, including dynamic advertising targeted at particular users.[5]

All transactions within PlayStation Home will use the Sony Wallet system within the PlayStation Store, although ultimately transactions will be possible without leaving Home.

Users will be able to make money in Home by using an auction service that will be implemented which will allow users to sell their Home assets and user-created content to other users. In a 2007 keynote speech, Phil Harrison described as a "Game 3.0" game.

In addition to content sold, users will be able to earn certain content based on certain milestones in a game.[21]

• Launch of closed beta trial planned to continue until the services full launch in October 2007.

• Sony announces at the Tokyo Game Show that the release of Home would be delayed until Spring 2008, and that the closed beta would be extended until then.

• Sony announces that the product has been delayed further, until Autumn 2008. The closed beta trial would be extended and opened up to more PlayStation Network users at an undisclosed date.
• An announcement on the SCEE forums confirms that winners of a weekly Warhawk tournament would be invited to join the beta[8]

• A PlayStation Home XMB theme is released on the PlayStation Store in Japan. The download registers the user's interest in joining the beta, but users will ultimately be hand-picked by SCEJ.[22]

• A localized PlayStation Home XMB theme is released on the PlayStation Store in North America, which similar to the Japanese theme will register the user's interest in joining the closed beta. Sony has stated that users will be chosen based on their activity on the PlayStation Network and the PlayStation Store.[23]
• SCEE sends beta invitations to the most active users on the European PlayStation Network and PlayStation Store.
• SCEHK announces details for the Home for the Asian region[24] and starts accepting applications for the closed beta on August 29, 2008. Sony will also grant invitations to users who purchase more than HK$60 or SG$12 worth of content in one single transaction over the Playstation Store from August 29 to September 12, 2008.[25]

• Closed beta: April 2007
• Open beta: Second half of 2008
• Final release date: TBA 2008

• Playstation Home Beta Trial
• Asian Home website (english)

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[1], and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.[2] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[3]

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.[4] 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 longer than it was previously thought possible to model.[5] 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. [6] For that goal they collaborate with various scientific institutions. [7] As of August 10, 2008, fifty-seven scientific research papers have been published using the project's work.[8] A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that Folding@home distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.[9]

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user's choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve "work units", which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

The Folding@home client utilizes modified versions of four molecular simulation programs for calculation: TINKER, GROMACS, AMBER, and CPMD.[10] Where possible, optimizations are used to speed the process of calculation. There are many variations on these base simulation programs, each of which is given an arbitrary identifier (Core xx):[11]

• GROMACS (all variants of this core use SIMD optimizations for x86 cores including SSE, 3DNow+ or AltiVec, where available, unless otherwise specified)
  • Gromacs (Core 78)
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
  • DGromacs (Core 79)
    • Double Precision Gromacs, uses SSE2 only.
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
  • DGromacsB (Core 7b)
    • Nominally an update of DGromacs, but is actually based on the SMP/GPU codebases (and is therefore a completely new core). As a result, both are still in use.
    • Double Precision Gromacs, uses SSE2 only.
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
  • DGromacsC (Core 7c)
    • Double Precision Gromacs, uses SSE2 only.
    • Available on Windows and Linux Uniprocessor clients only.
  • GBGromacs (Core 7a)
    • Gromacs with the Generalized Born implicit solvent model.
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
  • Gromacs SREM (Core 80)
    • Gromacs Serial Replica Exchange Method.
    • The Gromacs Serial Replica Exchange Method core, also known as GroST (Gromacs Serial replica exchange with Temperatures), uses Replica Exchange Method (also known as REMD or Replica Exchange Molecular Dynamics) in its simulations.
    • Available for Windows and Linux Uniprocessor clients only.
  • GroSimT (Core 81)
    • Gromacs with Simulated Tempering.
    • Available for Windows and Linux Uniprocessor clients only.
  • Gromacs 33 (Core a0)
    • Uses the newer Gromacs 3.3 codebase.
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
  • Gro-SMP (Core a1)
    • Symmetric MultiProcessing variant, locked to four threads (but can be run on dual core processors).
    • Runs only on multi-core x86 or x64 hardware, uses SSE only.
    • Available for all SMP clients only.
  • GroCVS (Core a2)
    • Symmetric MultiProcessing variant with scalable numbers of threads.
    • Runs only on multi-core x86 or x64 hardware, with four or more cores, uses SSE only.
    • Uses the Gromacs 3.3.99 codebase (the latest stable release at the time of coding).
    • Available for all SMP clients only.
  • GroGPU2 (Core 11)
    • Graphics Processing Unit variant for ATI CAL-enabled and nVidia CUDA-enabled GPUs.
    • Comes in two separate versions, one each for ATI and nVidia, but both have the same Core ID.
    • GPUs do not have optimizations.
    • Available for GPU2 client only.
  • Gro-PS3 (Does not have a known ID number, but also called SCEARD core)
    • PlayStation 3 variant.
    • No SIMD optimizations, uses SPE cores for optimization.
    • Available for PS3 client only.
• AMBER
  • PMD (Core 82)[11]
    • No optimizations.
    • Available for Windows and Linux Uniprocessor clients only.

• TINKER
  • Tinker core (Core 65)
    • Currently inactive, as the GBGromacs core (Core 7a) performs the same tasks much faster.
    • No optimizations.
    • Available for all Uniprocessor clients only.
• GROMACS
  • GroGPU (Core 10)
    • Graphics Processing Unit variant for ATI series 1xxx GPUs.
    • GPUs do not have optimizations; no SIMD optimizations needed since GPU cores are explicitly designed for SIMD.
    • Inactive as of June 6, 2008 due to end of distribution of GPU1 client units.
    • Available for GPU1 client only.
• CPMD
  • QMD (Core 96)
    • Currently inactive, due to QMD developer graduating from Stanford University and due to current research shifting away from Quantum MD.
    • Caused controversy due to SSE2 issues involving Intel libraries and AMD processors.[12]
    • Uses SSE2 (currently only on Intel CPUs, see above).
    • Available for Windows and Linux Uniprocessor clients only.

• ProtoMol [7]
• SHARPEN [13]

Shortly after breaking the 200,000 active CPU count on September 20, 2005, the Folding@home project celebrated its fifth anniversary on October 1, 2005.

Interest and participation in the project has grown steadily since its launch. The number of active devices participating in the project increased substantially after receiving much publicity during the launch of their high performance clients for both ATi graphics cards and the PlayStation 3, and again following the launch of the high performance client for nVidia graphics cards.

As of August 29, 2008 the peak speed of the project overall has reached over 3.349 PFLOPS, and the project has received computational results from over 3.2 million devices since it first started.[2]

On September 16, 2007, the Folding@home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to do so, although it had briefly peaked above one petaFLOPS in March 2007.[14][15]. In comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world (as of June 2008, IBM's Roadrunner) peaks at 1.026 petaFLOPS[16]. In early May 2008 the project attained a sustained performance level higher than two petaFLOPS, again being the first computing system of any kind to do so. Now Folding@home computing cluster operates at above 2 petaFLOPS at all times, with a large majority of the performance coming from PlayStation 3 and GPU clients.[2] On August 20, 2008, the Folding@home project broke the three petaFLOPS milestone, once again being the first computing project of any kind in history to ever do so.[2]

There used to be cooperation between Folding@home and Google Labs in the form of Google Toolbar. Google Compute supported Folding@home during its early stage — when Folding@home had ~10,000 active CPUs. At that time, a boost of 20,000 machines was very significant. Today the project has a large number of active CPUs and the number of new clients joining Google Compute was very low (most people opted for the Folding@home client instead), so it was discontinued. The Google Compute clients also had certain limits: they could only run the TINKER core and had limited naming and team options. Folding@home is no longer supported on Google Toolbar, and even the old Google Toolbar client will not work.[17]

Folding@home absorbed the Genome@home project on March 8, 2004. The work which was started by the Genome@home project has since been completed using the Folding@home network (the work units without deadlines), and no new work is being distributed by this project. All donators were encouraged to download the Folding@home client (the F@h 4.xx client had a Genome@home option), and once the Genome@home work was complete these clients were asked to donate their processing power to the Folding@home project instead.

These peer-reviewed papers (in chronological order) all use research from the Folding@home project.[8]

• "Screen savers of the world, Unite!", Michael R. Shirts and Vijay Pande, (2000)
• "Mathematical Foundations of ensemble dynamics", Michael R. Shirts and Vijay Pande, (2001)
• "b-Hairpin Folding Simulations in Atomistic Detail Using an Implicit Solvent Model", Bojan Zagrovic, Eric J. Sorin, and Vijay Pande, (2001)

• "Atomistic protein folding simulations on the submillisecond timescale using worldwide distributed computing", Vijay Pande, et al. Peter Kollman Memorial Issue, (2002)
• "Folding@home and Genome@home: Using distributed computing to tackle previously intractable problems in computational biology", Stefan M. Larson, Christopher D. Snow, Michael R. Shirts, and Vijay S. Pande. To appear in , Richard Grant, editor, Horizon Press (2002)
• "Simulation of Folding of a Small Alpha-helical Protein in Atomistic Detail using Worldwidedistributed Computing", Bojan Zagrovic, Christopher D. Snow, Michael R. Shirts, and Vijay S. Pande. (2002)
• "Native-like Mean Structure in the Unfolded Ensemble of Small Proteins", Bojan Zagrovic, Christopher D. Snow, Siraj Khaliq, Michael R. Shirts, and Vijay S. Pande. (2002)
• "Absolute comparison of simulated and experimental protein-folding dynamics", Christopher D. Snow, Houbi Ngyen, Vijay S. Pande, and Martin Gruebele. (2002)
• "The Trp Cage: Folding Kinetics and Unfolded State Topology via Molecular Dynamics Simulations", Christopher D. Snow, Bojan Zagrovic, and Vijay S. Pande. (2002)

• "Multiplexed-Replica Exchange Molecular Dynamics Method for Protein Folding Simulation", Young Min Rhee & Vijay S. Pande. (2003)
• "Insights Into Nucleic Acid Conformational Dynamics from Massively Parallel Stochastic Simulations", Eric J. Sorin, Young Min Rhee, Bradley J. Nakatani & Vijay S. Pande. (2003)
• "Solvent Viscosity Dependence of the Folding Rate of a Small Protein: Distributed Computing Study", Bojan Zagrovic and Vijay S. Pande. (2003)
• "Extremely precise free energy calculations of amino acid side chain analogs: Comparison of common molecular mechanics force fields for proteins", Michael R. Shirts, Jed W. Pitera, William C. Swope, and Vijay S. Pande. (2003)
• "Equilibrium Free Energies from Nonequilibrium Measurements Using Maximum-Likelihood Methods", Michael R. Shirts, Eric Bair, Giles Hooker, and Vijay S Pande. (2003)
• "Structural correspondence between the alpha-helix and the random-flight chain resolves how unfolded proteins can have native-like properties", Bojan Zagrovic & Vijay S Pande. (2003)

• "Does Native State Topology Determine the RNA Folding Mechanism?", Eric J. Sorin, Bradley J. Nakatani, Young Min Rhee, Guha Jayachandran, V Vishal, & Vijay S Pande. (2004)
• "Trp zipper folding kinetics by molecular dynamics and temperature-jump spectroscopy", Christopher D. Snow, Linlin Qiu, Deguo Du, Feng Gai, Stephen J. Hagen, & Vijay S Pande. (2004)
• "Simulations of the role of water in the protein-folding mechanism", Young Min Rhee, Eric J. Sorin, Guha Jayachandran, Erik Lindahl, & Vijay S Pande. (2004)
• "Using path sampling to build better Markovian state models: Predicting the folding rate and mechanism of a tryptophan zipper beta hairpin", Nina Singhal, Christopher D. Snow, and Vijay S. Pande. (2004)

• "Dimerization of the p53 Oligomerization Domain: Identification of a Folding Nucleus by Molecular Dynamics Simulations", Lillian T. Chong, Christopher D. Snow, Young Min Rhee, and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Does Water Play a Structural Role in the Folding of Small Nucleic Acids?", Eric J. Sorin, Young Min Rhee, and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Exploring the Helix-Coil Transition via All-atom Equilibrium Ensemble Simulations", Eric J. Sorin and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Empirical Force-Field Assessment: The Interplay Between Backbone Torsions and Noncovalent Term Scaling", Eric J. Sorin and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "How well can simulation predict protein folding kinetics and thermodynamics?", Christopher D. Snow, Eric J. Sorin, Young Min Rhee, and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Unusual compactness of a polyproline type II structure", Bojan Zagrovic, Jan Lipfert, Eric J. Sorin, Ian S. Millett, Wilfred F. van Gunsteren, Sebastian Doniach & Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Foldamer dynamics expressed via Markov state models. II. State space decomposition", Sidney Elmer, Sanghyun Park, & Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Foldamer dynamics expressed via Markov state models. I. Explicit solvent molecular-dynamics simulations in acetonitrile, chloroform, methanol, and water", Sidney Elmer, Sanghyun Park, & Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Solvation free energies of amino acid side chain analogs for common molecular mechanics water models", Michael R. Shirts & Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Comparison of efficiency and bias of free energies computed by exponential averaging, the Bennett acceptance ratio, and thermodynamic integration", Michael R. Shirts & Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "A New Set of Molecular Mechanics Parameters for Hydroxyproline and Its Use in Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Collagen-Like Peptides", Sanghyun Park, Randall J. Radmer, Teri E. Klein, and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• Direct calculation of the binding free energies of FKBP ligands using the Fujitsu BioServer massively parallel computer", Hideaki Fujutani, Yoshiaki Tanida, Masakatsu Ito, Guha Jayachandran, Christopher D. Snow, Michael R. Shirts, Eric J. Sorin, and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Error Analysis in Markovian State Models for protein folding", Nina Singhal and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "How large is alpha-helix in solution? Studies of the radii of gyration of helical peptides by SAXS and MD", Bojan Zagrovic, Guha Jayachandran, Ian S. Millett, Sebastian Doniach and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)
• "Can conformational change be described by only a few normal modes?", Paula Petrone and Vijay S. Pande. (2005)

• "The solvation interface is a determining factor in peptide conformational preferences", Eric J. Sorin, Young Min Rhee, Michael R. Shirts, and Vijay S. Pande. (2006)
• "Nanotube confinement denatures protein helices", Eric J. Sorin and Vijay S. Pande. (2006)
• "On the role of chemical detail in simulating protein folding kinetics", Young Min Rhee and Vijay S. Pande. (2006)
• "Validation of Markov state models using Shannon's entropy", S. Park and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "A novel approach for computational alanine scanning: application to the p53 oligomerization domain", L.T. Chong, W. C. Swope, J. W. Pitera, and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Electric Fields at the Active Site of an Enzyme: Direct Comparison of Experiment with Theory", Ian T. Suydam, Christopher D. Snow, Vijay S. Pande, Steven G. Boxer. (2006)
• "Ensemble molecular dynamics yields submillisecond kinetics and intermediates of membrane fusion", P. Kasson, N. Kelley, N. Singhal, M. Vrjlic, A. Brunger, and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Folding Simulations of the Villin Headpiece in All-Atom Detail", Guha Jayachandran, V. Vishal, and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Parallelized Over Parts Computation of Absolute Binding Free Energy with Docking and Molecular Dynamics", Guha Jayachandran, M. R. Shirts, S. Park, and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Kinetic Definition of Protein Folding Transition State Ensembles and Reaction Coordinates", C. Snow and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Local structure formation in simulations of two small proteins", Guha Jayachandran, V. Vishal, Angel E. Garcıa and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "A Bayesian Update Method for Adaptive Weighted Sampling", S. Park and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "Predicting structure and dynamics of loosely-ordered protein complexes: influenza hemagglutinin fusion peptide", P. Kasson and V. S. Pande. (2006)
• "N-Body simulation on GPUs", Erich Elsen, Mike Houston, V. Vishal, Eric Darve, Pat Hanrahan, and Vijay Pande. (2006)

• "Storage@home: Petascale Distributed Storage", Adam L Beberg and Vijay S. Pande. (2007)
• "Automatic State Decomposition Algorithm", J. Chodera, N. Singhal, V. S. Pande, K. Dill, and W. Swope. (2007)
• "Protein folding under confinement: a role for solvent", D. Lucent, V. Vishal, V. S. Pande. (2007)
• "Persistent voids: a new structural metric for membrane fusion", P. M. Kasson, A. Zomorodian, S. Park, N. Singhal, L. J. Guibas, and V. S. Pande. (2007)
• "Control of Membrane Fusion Mechanism by Lipid Composition: Predictions from Ensemble Molecular Dynamics", P. M. Kasson and V. S. Pande. (2007)
• "Heterogeneity Even at the Speed Limit of Folding: Large-scale Molecular Dynamics Study of a Fast-folding Variant of the Villin Headpiece", D. Ensign, P. M. Kasson, and V. S. Pande. (2007)
• "Calculation of the distribution of eigenvalues and eigenvectors in Markovian state models for molecular dynamics", Nina Singhal Hinrichs and Vijay S. Pande. (2007)

• "Convergence of folding free energy landscapes via application of enhanced sampling methods in a distributed computing environment", Xuhui Huang, Gregory R. Bowman,and Vijay S. Pande. (2008)
• "Structural Insight into RNA Hairpin Folding Intermediates", Gregory R. Bowman, Xuhui Huang, Yuan Yao, Jian Sun, Gunnar Carlsson, Leonidas J. Guibas, and Vijay S. Pande. (2008)

On October 2, 2006, the Folding@home Windows GPU client was released to the public as a beta test. After 9 days of processing from the Beta client the Folding@home project had received 31 teraFLOPs of computational performance from just 450 ATI X1900 GPUs, averaging at over 70x the performance of current CPU submissions, and the GPU clients remain the most powerful clients available in terms of performance per client (as of August 24, 2008, GPU clients accounted for the majority of entire project's throughput—over 1.8 petaFLOPs of computational power—at an approximate ratio of 9 clients per teraFLOP).[2] On April 10, 2008, the second generation Windows GPU client was released to open beta testing, supporting ATI/AMD's HD2xxx and HD3xxx series, and also debuting a new core (GROGPU2 - Core 11). Inaccuracies with DirectX were cited as the main reason for the migration to the new version (the original GPU client was officially retired June 6, 2008[18]), which uses AMD/ATI's CAL. On June 17, 2008, a version of the second-generation Windows GPU client for CUDA enabled Nvidia GPUs was also released for public beta testing.[19] The GPU clients proved reliable enough to be promoted out of the beta phase and were officially released August 1, 2008.[20]

Stanford announced in August 2006 that a folding client was available to run on the Sony PlayStation 3.[21] The intent was that gamers would be able to contribute to the project by merely "contributing electricity", leaving their PlayStation 3 consoles running the client while not playing games. PS3 firmware version 1.6 (released on Thursday, March 22, 2007) allows for Folding@home software, a 50 MB download, to be used on the PS3.[2] A peak output of the project at 990 teraFLOPS was achieved on 25 March 2007, at which time the number of FLOPS from each PS3 as reported by Stanford fell, reducing the overall speed rating of those machines by 50%. This had the effect of bumping down the overall project speed to the mid 700 range and increasing the number of active PS3s required to achieve a petaFLOPS level to around 60,000.

On April 26, 2007, Sony released a new version of Folding@home which improved folding performance drastically, such that the updated PS3 clients produced 1500 teraFLOPS with 52,000 clients versus the previous 400 teraFLOPS by around 24,000 clients.[22] Lately, the console accounts for around 40% of all teraFLOPS at an approximate ratio of 35½ PS3 clients per teraFLOP.

On December 19, 2007, Sony again updated the Folding@home client to version 1.3 to allow users to run music stored on their hard drives while contributing. Another feature of the 1.3 update allows users to automatically shut down their console after current work is done or after a limited period of time (for example 3 or 4 hours). Also, the software update added the Generalized Born implicit solvent model, so the FAH PS3 client gained more broad computing capabilities.[23][24] Shortly afterward, 1.3.1 was released to solve a mishandling of protocol resulting in difficulties sending and receiving Work Units due to heavy server loads stemming from the fault.

As more modern CPUs are being released, the migration to multiple cores is becoming more adopted by the public, and the Pande Group is adding symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support to the Folding@home client in the hopes of capturing the additional processing power. The SMP support is being achieved by utilizing Message Passing Interface protocols. In current state it is being confined inside a single node by hard coded usage of the localhost.

On November 13, 2006, the beta SMP Folding@home clients for x86-64 Linux and x86 Mac OS X have been released. The beta win32 SMP Folding@home client is out as well, and a 32-bit Linux client is currently in development.[25]

A typical Folding@home user, running the client on a single PC, will likely not be ranked high on the list of contributors. However, if the user were to join a team, they would add the points they receive to a larger collective. Teams work by using the combined score of all their members. Thus, teams are ranked much higher than inidual submitters. Rivalries between teams create friendly competition that benefits the folding community. Many teams publish their own stats, so members can have intra-team competitions for top spots.[26] Some teams offer prizes in an attempt to increase participation in the project. [27]

The Folding@home project does not make the project source code available to the public, citing security and integrity concerns.[28][29] At the same time, the majority of the scientific codes used by the FAH (ex. Cosm, GROMACS, TINKER, AMBER, CPMD, BrookGPU) are largely Open-source software or under similar licenses.

A development version of Folding@home once ran on the open source BOINC framework; however, this version remained unreleased.[30]

A PlayStation 3 has a maximum power rating of 380 watts. As Folding@home is a CPU intensive application, it causes 100% utilization. However, according to Stanford's PS3 FAQ, "We expect the PS3 to use about 200W while running Folding@home."[31] As of March 30, 2008, there are 40,276 PS3s providing 1,216,000,000 MFlops of processing power. This amounts to 30,191MFlops/PS3, and with Stanford's estimate of 200W per PS3 (for original units manufactured on the 90nm process), 151MFlops/watt.[2] This would put the PS3 portion of Folding@home at 34th on the February 2008 Green500 list[32] The Cell processors used in current units of the PlayStation 3 utilize 65nm technology (lowering power consumption to around 115W per PS3), with another upgrade to 45nm planned (further dropping consumption to around 80W/PS3). This will further increase the power efficiency of the contribution from PlayStation 3 units.

The total power consumption required to produce the processing power required by the project can be estimated based upon the average FLOPS per watt. As of 2008, according to the Green500 list, the most efficient computer - also based on a version of the Cell BE - runs at 488.17 MFLOPS/watt.[33] One petaFLOPS equals 1,000,000,000 MFLOPSs. Therefore, the current Folding@home project, if it were theoretically using the most efficient CPUs currently available, would use at least 2.8 megawatts of power per petaFLOPS, slightly more than the world's first and only petaflop system, the Cell-based Roadrunner which uses 2.345MW. This is equivalent to the power needed to light approximately 40,000 standard house light bulbs (between 60 and 100 watts each), or the equivalent of 0.5-3 electrical wind mills depending on their size. [34]

Estimates of power usage per time period are more difficult than estimates of power usage per processing instruction. This is because Folding@home clients are often run on computers that would be powered-on even in the absence of the Folding@home client, and that run other programs simultaneously. While Folding@home increases processor utilization, and thus (usually) power consumption, the extent to which it does so is dependent on the client processor's normal operating load, and its ability to reduce clock speeds when presented with less-than-full utilization (a process known as dynamic frequency scaling). Consequently, the total power usage of the Folding@home client on a temporal basis is probably less than the figure that could be calculated by summing the peak power consumption of each of the project's component processors.

• Blue Gene
• Grid computing
• List of distributed computing projects
• Rosetta@Home
• Software for molecular modeling

• M. R. Shirts and V. S. Pande. (2000). "Screen Savers of the World, Unite!". 290 : 1903–1904. doi:. PMID 17742054.
• C. Snow, H. Nguyen, V. S. Pande, and M. Gruebele. (2002). "Folding of a bba protein: simulation and theory". 420 : 102–106. doi:.
• C. D. Snow, E. J. Sorin, Y. M. Rhee, and V. S. Pande. (2005). "How well can simulation predict protein folding kinetics and thermodynamics?". 34 : 43–69.
• L. T. Chong, C. D. Snow, Y. M. Rhee, and V. S. Pande. (2004). "Dimerization of the p53 oligomerization domain: Identification of a folding nucleus by molecular dynamics simulations". 345 : 869–78. doi:.
• I. Suydam, C. D. Snow, V. S. Pande and S. G. Boxer. (2006). "Electric Fields at the Active Site of an Enzyme: Direct Comparison of Experiment with Theory". 313 (5784): 200 - 204.

• Folding@home project homepage
• Folding@home Results (published papers)
• FAH blog
• FAH Forum
• Folding@home
• Official Folding@home Stats
• Extreme OC Folding@home Stats
• Kakao Folding@home Stats
• pedia team
• Folding@home Instructional Video on YouTube