About
Folding@home is a free, open-source Mac app that turns your computer's idle power into part of a global distributed computing network for biomedical research. Once installed, your computer downloads a small piece of a real research simulation, runs it in the background, and returns the result, earning you points as you contribute. No account is required to get started.
The project has been applied to diseases including cancer (work on BRCA1 has revealed new therapeutic strategies for breast cancer), COVID-19 (the project reached 2.43 exaflops in April 2020 and helped identify a potential new antiviral in animal testing), Alzheimer's (research on ApoE into the most common cause of dementia), and Ebola (identifying transient "cryptic pockets" in the virus protein). Folding@home has produced more than 500 peer-reviewed papers since its launch in October 2000 and is led by Dr. Greg Bowman and the Folding@home Consortium of academic labs.
The app is simple to set up: download the macOS installer with one click, run it, and let your Mac contribute while it is otherwise idle. Competitive users can join or start teams, and the project publishes live stats, a Discord, a forum, and a GitHub repository.
What's new
All release notesHomebrew cask folding-at-home 8.5.6 (sha256 ed1ac610285280cb6636200e869b73ddd8f6241c00b9f3f3a4fa9730fbb75a48).