In 1999, Vijay Pande started as a professor at Stanford University, heading a research group. In order to push the envelope on what could be accomplished by his research group, it became clear that they would need to make a major push in computational power to perform research of interest.
One of the first challenges was to develop a way to efficiently use distributed computing. Not all problems are well-suited to distributed computing and protein folding was on the surface — not particularly well suited. However, after the development of novel algorithms, Dr. Pande’s group discovered a statistical technique which allowed for distributed computing to make significant advances and thus Folding@home was born.