WOULD U SAY THAT THE VR passages in the actual test are about this long? xx
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of significant academic interest with major implications for medical research into Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein’s final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world.Folding@home is one of the world’s fastest computing systems, with a speed of approximately 40 petaFLOPS: greater than all projects running on the BOINC, another computing platform, combined. This performance from its large-scale computing network has allowed researchers to run computationally expensive atomic-level simulations of protein folding thousands of times longer than previously achieved. Since its launch on October 1, 2000, the Pande Lab has produced 118 scientific research papers as a direct result of Folding@home. Results from the project’s simulations agree favorably with experiments.