Project Timeline
Folding@Home began in October 2000 in the lab of Dr. Vijay Pande at Stanford University. Since 2019, the project has been in the hands of Dr. Gregory Bowman, a former Pande Lab graduate student. In addition to the numerous scientists who have worked on the project over the years, F@h has been supported by thousands of dedicated volunteers who have enabled outstanding scientific research and computational achievements.
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Public launch
Folding@home launched at Stanford under Dr. Vijay Pande as the first distributed-computing project for biomolecular simulation.
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First cancer paper
Published the project's first cancer paper, on p53 oligomerization (Chong et al., 2004) — the first peer-reviewed cancer result from a distributed-computing project.
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First Alzheimer’s paper
Submitted the first paper on Folding@home and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers Vishal Vaidyanathan and Nick Kelley won best talk at BCATS 2005 for the work.
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Antibiotics
Began ribosome simulations — the project’s first work on antibiotics.
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Osteogenesis Imperfecta
First work on collagen mutations linked to osteogenesis imperfecta was accepted for publication.
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Parkinson’s disease
Started a pilot study on Parkinson’s disease.
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Huntington’s disease
Submitted the first papers on Folding@home results for Huntington’s disease.
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GPU1 client
Released the GPU1 client, delivering a 20–30× speedup over CPU folding.
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Folding for PS3
Launched Folding@home for PlayStation 3 via a collaboration with Sony. The client ran until November 6, 2012.
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NMR confirms predictions
Confirmed key computational predictions experimentally using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
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Anti-cancer chaperonin strategy
Started a new anti-cancer effort targeting chaperonin inhibitors, led by Del Lucent.
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First sustained petaFLOP
Reached one sustained petaFLOP — the first distributed computing system to do so.
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Guinness World Record
Guinness World Records recognized Folding@home as the most powerful distributed-computing network in the world.
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GPU2 client
Released the GPU2 client, succeeding GPU1 with broader hardware support.
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First peer-reviewed Alzheimer’s result
Published the first peer-reviewed Alzheimer’s paper, applying a Markov-state-model approach to amyloid-beta oligomerization.
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First work on viral infection
Published the project’s first work on the molecular interactions of viral infection and how they affect antiviral drugs.
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c-Src kinase
Began studying c-Src kinase activation — a target in several cancers — using the new Protomol Core B4.
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Huntington protein structure
Published a predicted structure for the Huntington protein headpiece in the *Journal of Molecular Biology*.
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GPU3 client
Released the GPU3 client with broader vendor support.
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Chagas disease
Started a pilot project on Chagas disease, a major disease in Latin America.
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Malaria
Started a pilot project on malaria, building on methods from the Chagas work.
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Bowman wins Kuhn Award
Gregory Bowman won the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award.
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Ten years of folding
Folding@home celebrated its tenth anniversary.
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Copernicus released
Released Copernicus, an open-source companion simulation framework.
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Type-2 diabetes
The Huang Lab at HKUST joined the Consortium with two projects on type-2 diabetes-related misfolding.
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V7 client
Released the V7 client — a unified single-binary replacement for previous platform-specific clients.
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IL-2 mutant, 300× potency
Helped the Garcia lab design an IL-2 mutant 300× more effective than natural IL-2 in cancer therapy, with far fewer side effects.
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New Alzheimer’s drug candidates
Published new small-molecule Alzheimer’s drug candidates in the *Journal of Medicinal Chemistry*.
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10 petaFLOPS
Folding@home exceeded 10 petaFLOPS.
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c-Src kinase paper
Published c-Src kinase results identifying a unique drug-binding site — a route to more specific anti-cancer drugs.
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Folding for Chrome
Released a beta Folding@home client for Google Chrome, allowing folding directly in the browser. (Retired June 2019.)
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40 petaFLOPS
Folding@home exceeded 40 petaFLOPS.
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Folding for Android
Released the Android client in collaboration with Sony, later expanded to broader Android support. (Removed from Google Play February 2018.)
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100 petaFLOPS
Folding@home exceeded 100 petaFLOPS.
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Team EVGA passes 100 billion points
Team EVGA became the first team to pass 100 billion lifetime points.
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Leadership transition to WashU
Dr. Gregory Bowman took over leadership from Vijay Pande; the project moved to Washington University in St. Louis.
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World’s first exaFLOP
During the COVID-19 surge Folding@home crossed 470 petaFLOPS and then on March 25 became the world’s first exaFLOP computing system at approximately 1.5 exaFLOPS.
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COVID Moonshot
Began coronavirus protein simulations and joined the COVID Moonshot open-science antiviral drug-discovery program.
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CUDA support
NVIDIA CUDA support landed in core22, giving GPU folders 15–30% speedups on most projects and 50–400% on COVID Moonshot workloads.
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COVID Moonshot funded
The COVID Moonshot received a $10M Wellcome Trust / WHO ACT Accelerator grant to develop a patent-free oral antiviral.
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AlphaFold integration
Adopted AlphaFold-predicted structures as starting points for new Folding@home projects, broadening the targetable proteome.
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Physics-based precision medicine
Laid out a research thesis for physics-based precision medicine — using Folding@home simulations to tailor therapies to each patient’s mutations.
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Bastet client (v8)
Released the Bastet client — a streamlined, open-source v8 with a unified web UI for managing every machine from one page.
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Spike dynamics experimentally confirmed
Cryo-EM experiments confirmed Folding@home’s early COVID-era prediction that the SARS-CoV-2 spike opens more widely than expected, exposing cryptic drug-binding surfaces.
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Powering AI in structural biology
Folding@home simulation data began feeding AI/ML models in structural biology and drug discovery, extending the project’s impact beyond direct simulation results.
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Targeting KRAS
Published new simulation work on KRAS — long considered an undruggable cancer target — revealing pathways for targeted protein degradation.