Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Supercomputers are not only very expensive to operate, but they are often simultaneously shared by many different research groups, and it is a challenge to scale a molecular simulation to all of their processors. Protein folding dynamics is statistical in nature, so a single long simulation from a supercomputer would not be sufficient to fully understand the folding process. Folding@home is one of the most powerful computing systems on the planet, and we use novel methods to utilize its network to statistically analyse the dynamics of protein folding. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not be possible by any other means! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.
