We should start a SolidWorks Community Folding team. Were too late for the Chimp Challenge but it would be a great way to show off a little PC muscle and contribute to a good cause at the same time. Let me know if your interested!

What is Folding@home? What is protein folding?

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, that very simply  stated, studies protein folding and misfolding.  Protein folding is  explained in more detail in the scientific background section.

What is distributed computing?

Distributed  Computing is a method of computer processing in which different  parts of a program, or different portions of data, are processing  simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each  other over a network or through the Internet.

Who "owns" the results? What will happen  to them?

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run  by an academic institution (specifically the Pande  Group, at Stanford University's - Chemistry  Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science  research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off  of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others  to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made  available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the  simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication,  and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after  publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles that  analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for  everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.

What has been "folded" so far, and how  much have I folded?

We keep many types of statistics of users and work accomplished  in our Stats section. You  can check your Individual stats, Team stats, and overall Project stats. Please also review the Results and Awards sections.

What has the project completed so far?

We have been able to fold several proteins in the 5-10  microsecond time range with experimental validation of our folding  kinetics. This is a fundamental advance over previous work. Scientific  papers detailing our results can be found in the Results section.  We are now moving to other important proteins used in structural biology  studies of folding as well as proteins involved in disease. There are  many peer-reviewed and published in top journals (Science, Nature,  Nature Structural Biology, PNAS, JMB, etc) that have resulted from FAH.  Currently, the FAH project has published more papers than all of the  other major distributed computing projects combined!

Why not just use a supercomputer?

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! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not  need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a  supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of  processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of  processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@home would not  be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given  exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would  still have fewer computing cycles than we do with the Folding@home  cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and  there are hundreds of millions of PCs  sitting idle in the world.

Check out the Folding@Home FAQ page: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main