Open source

Most of the Folding@home codebase is open source — both the donor-facing client and the analysis infrastructure researchers use. This page lists the main components and where to find them.

The client

As of version 8, the Folding@home donor client is open source on GitHub:

• fah-client-bastet — the headless folding service that runs on your computer.
• fah-web-client-bastet — the local web UI you interact with in your browser.

Bug reports and contributions are welcome on either repo's issue tracker.

The simulation engines

The actual molecular-dynamics computation runs in folding cores, which wrap two well-established open-source MD packages:

• GROMACS — used for most CPU and many GPU work units.
• OpenMM — used for GPU-heavy projects, particularly on AMD and modern NVIDIA hardware.

Any modifications Folding@home has made to either package have been contributed back upstream.

Analysis infrastructure

Two methods libraries developed for F@h have become general-purpose tools used well beyond the project:

• MSMBuilder (2009) — the open-source library for building Markov State Models from short trajectories. Used by labs with no connection to F@h.
• Copernicus (2011) — an open-source workflow engine for running adaptive sampling on clusters and supercomputers.

Both came out of the work that earned the original developer team the American Chemical Society's Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award. More on the science →