Folding@home - Contribute
Ways to contribute to the Folding@home project.
Volunteer computing:
The easiest way to contribute is by running the free Folding@home software on your computer. Folding@home can be run easily on most computers. If you run into any trouble, the friendly folks (mainly other volunteers) at the forum or Discord channel can help. In addition to the thousands of users who run Folding@home at home, these organisations have also contributed their computational resources to Folding@home. Please ensure you own the computers you use to run Folding@home or have written permission to do so if you're planning on setting this up at your workplace.- client downloads - The official clients for Windows, Linux (Debian / Mint / Ubuntu, Redhat / Centos / Fedora and ARM Linux / Raspberry Pi) and macOS.
- There are no clients available for Android and iOS devices or gaming consoles at this time.
Assisting other users:
If you have been running Folding@home or are familiar with how it works, you could assist other users in the Folding@home community with issues or questions related to Folding@home. While the scientists who work at Folding@home do frequent these forums, a majority of the support is provided by volunteers.- foldingforum.org - The official support/ discussion forum.
- Discord channel - The official Discord channel.
Financial donations:
To make a financial donation or contribution to Folding@home,- visit the donations page where you can make a tax deductible donation by donating to Washington University in Saint Louis (via Gregory Bowman's research group).
- purchase swag from their merchandise store.
- support the COVID Moonshot initiative (whose computation muscle is provided by Folding@home) by donating to their GoFundMe campaign.
Software development:
If you are a software developer looking to contribute your skills to improve Folding@home, consider contacting the Folding@home team first via the forum or Discord channel before you submit a patch that involves substantial effort to ensure your work aligns with the goals of the project.- Folding@home client: The Folding@home client is not open source at this time. There are plans to make this open source at some time in the near future. However, certain components of the Folding@home client are already open source:
- fah-control - The advanced control component to control the client.
- fah-web-client - The web based client.
- fah-client-win-installer - The Windows installer.
- fah-client-osx-installer - The macOS installer.
- fah-viewer - The protein viewer.
- fah-screensaver - The Windows screensaver.
- Folding@home science cores: Folding@home uses open source molecular dynamics packages for its simulations.