Folding@home

Introduction

Folding@home (FAH) is a distributed computing project that has been at the forefront of scientific research for over two decades. Developed by the Pande Lab at Stanford University, Folding@home uses the collective processing power of thousands of volunteers' computers from all over the world to simulate protein folding and understand diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, cystic fibrosis and many others.

Users can contribute to the Folding@home project by downloading and installing the Folding@home software on their computers, which runs simulations of protein folding in the background and only while the user's computer is idle. By doing so, users can donate their computing power to the project. To further incentivize people to contribute to the project, users can create or join a team to compete with others and track their contributions on the Folding@home leaderboard. Overall the Folding@home project has attracted over 1.2 million users.

On this site we will provide an overview of the people and organizations who contribute Folding@home, why they contribute and where they contribute from to gain a better insight on why this software is so popular. All the used data was obtained from the Folding@home API in April 2023.

Motivations for Contribution

Folding@home is a project that's largely reliant on volunteers. As such, users have individual reasons to support the project. These users often join a team with similar interests. By examining the most prominent teams, it is possible to shape a more global picture of the benefactors of the project. Two angles will be examined: what category the teams belong to, i.e. what their interests are, and whether or not users within the team get rewarded for their contributions.

Team category

Firstly, the biggest contributors to the project are cryptocurrency enthusiasts. These cryptocurrencies, such as Banano or Gridcoins, reward the users based on the credits they get while completing their work units. These crypto coins usually have very low payout compared to other crypto coins however, though it is often enough to compensate for the electricity spent. The second largest group is the default group, consisting of anonymous users. When users use Folding@home without joining any teams, they are automatically part of the Default team. These users mainly use weaker machines compared to others, but make up for it with a larger combined user count. Thirdly, the next group are hardware enthusiasts. They use Folding@home for stress testing or for keeping their older machines useful. Notably, this group also includes tech company such as Nvidia, Apple, and AMD. The fourth group is the research group whose main focus is furthering scientific advancements. This group also includes the Pande Lab, which is the lab in Stanford University responsible for the Folding@home project. Finally, the last group consists of people or communities with different interests or without public information.

Team rewards

Asides from looking at specific categories teams might belong to, it can be helpful to look if users get compensated for their contributions. Sixty percent of the work units are done by volunteers who don't expect anything in return. The other forty percent are either rewarded directly when they finish a task, such as is the case with Banano, or can be compensated in some way through giveaways or contests, such as ExtremeHW.

The Evolution of Folding@home

Since its start in 2000, the Folding@home project has experienced tremendous growth, both in terms of the number of contributors and the amount of computational power available for scientific research. Initially, Folding@home was only run on a cluster of computers at universities and research institutes. As more and more people became interested in the project, the Pande Lab also allowed volunteers to run Folding@home nodes on their personal computers. Over the years, the project has grown significantly, with over a million active contributors. This combined with the advances in computer hardware, resulted in an exponential increase in the available computational power.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 was an important event for the Folding@home project. Researchers used the platform to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus and identify potential drug targets. This increased the media coverage about the project and caused a surge in growth. In the two weeks after the public announcement of the first simulations, over 400 thousand new devices joined the project. With all the combined power making it the most powerful supercomputer in the world, beating the Summit supercomputer by a factor of five at its peak, as was mentioned in the paper SARS-CoV-2 Simulations Go Exascale to Capture Spike Opening and Reveal Cryptic Pockets Across the Proteome and in an article by Folding@home. Since the beginning of 2021 however the amount of work units completed decreased drastically, which coincided with the release of the Covid-19 vaccines.

To analyze the growth of Folding@home, the API was queried to fetch data about the amount of work units performed per month. The API, however, only allowed gathering data up to February of 2021.

We'll also have a look at the growth of teams of Folding@home users, by their work done. The chart below shows the contributions of the top five teams by rank, relative to each other. When users don't joint a group, they are added to the Default team. The two largest teams are the Default group and www.banano.cc, with Banano surpassing the Default group.

Banano is a crypto currency where protein folding is simulated as a proof of work to mine Banano coins. Other large teams are the LinuxTechTips_Team, a team associated with the Linus Tech Tips youtube channel; CureCoin, another Folding@home based crypto currency; and folding@evga, a team associated with the computer computer hardware producer Evga.

Who is Contributing

Folding@home users can join teams to collectively combine their work units and credits. Joining a team does not affect users' own work units, but it does encourage them to join and interact with communities, which might be a big motivational factor. Looking at the forums of these teams, joining a team is useful for contributors because they can ask for help or give encouragement to each other. It also creates a (friendly) competitive environment, where some users compete with either each other within a team, or with other teams.

Taking a closer look at the top 1000 teams, it seems that the majority of the teams have a relatively small member count, which may suggest that most volunteers work in small friend- or colleague groups. The very large groups are usually centered around already existing organizations which have joined Folding@home later in their existence, or around a reward system for joining their group and performing well, such as the cryptocurrency groups like Banano.

Comparing the total work units completed by these top 1000 teams also shows that nearly a fourth of all the work is done by a single group, the Banano team. The top five groups, which includes the default team, make up for over half of all the work, and the top ten teams over three fifths of all the completed calculations. Because there are no limits to how many members a group can have, most people choose to either not join a team or choose to join one of the most popular teams.

Where Are Contributions Coming From

As Folding@home is a world-wide initiative, it has users contributing from all over the world. The exact location data is not made available due to privacy concerns. While it was not possible to inspect and visualize the location data ourselves, Folding@home did publish a map of the approximate locations of all contributors in a blog post in 2022.

Other data that is publicly available is the metadata of the work-, assignment-, and collection servers. Aside from the domain, version of the Folding@home software, supervisor contact, and other statistics, this also includes the IP address of each server. Looking up the location based on the IP address gives us an approximate location for each server. While not all of them are 100% accurate, the following map gives an overview of the server location distribution over the world. The majority of the servers are located in the east coast of America.

What Hardware is Used

One of the project's strengths is its ability to run simulations on a wide range of computer hardware, from personal laptops to high-performance computing clusters. The project keeps track of the hardware the users use when folding. As the Folding@home API doesn't provide the detailed hardware information, only broad categories are known. The majority of the users run Folding@home on their CPUs with the Windows operating system.

Contribute Yourself

Folding@home is free and open-source software, and anyone with an internet connection and a computer can participate in the project by downloading the client software and joining a team or contributing anonymously. Users can choose to donate their unused processing power to the project, and their contributions are credited on a leaderboard. Some external organizations even provide payments to contributors as an additional incentive to contribute idle processing power.