Happy 10th Folding@home

[VijayPande]

It’s with great pleasure that I announce that today is Folding@home’s official tenth anniversary. It’s been an amazing 10 years, especially in terms of what we’ve collectively been able to do, and my team and I are grateful for all the contributions by millions of people that has made this possible. If you’re curious to see what we’ve done so far, please check out our Results section or Diseases FAQ. In particular, we're very excited about recent work on protein folding, which could radically reshape how people think about folding (leading to recent awards).

Behind the scenes, we’ve been planning some 10 year celebration activities, including a new client, better client software feedback of what’s going on, some new client surprises through new collaborations, new backend software, and enhanced science via new cores. We’re also pushing to support more hardware, such as new support for OpenCL on ATI hardware (an ATI OpenMM/OpenCL core16 is in internal testing, although it requires the v7 client).

One key big picture goal for this year is our push to try to make FAH much easier, interesting, and fun to use by donors. With a new server backend soon to be in place, we should be ready to scale to much higher levels and we’re excited about what we can do with the combination of a new client that’s easier to run, much more stable backend, and new science in cores A3, A4, 15, and 16.

Finally, amongst some of the surprises are new initiatives that I hope will change how people think about distributed computing. That’s clearly a lot to hope for, but that’s our goal. Sorry for being so coy about this now, but I wanted to let people know there’s a lot going on behind the scenes and we’ll be talking about this more as we announce these initiatives throughout the year.

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2010/10 ... rsary.html