Where Folding@Home is heading

Vijay Pande has posted a 'Long term vision' on his blog about Folding@Home about where it is heading and what sort of results we can expect Science wise.

He mentions the fact that the first few years of the project was spent working out the right types of methods to use to enable a functional Distributed Computing network.

The next step was to work in the latest range of clients (Playstation 3, SMP and GPU) which has been a big task to accomplish and still not perfected as of yet. An 'SMP2' client is the next target for the development team, with hopes that it will be similar to the transformation of the GPU to GPU2 client. Vijay comments saying -

"Our goal is to be bleeding edge in the nature of our science, but get back to the simplicity and stability found in the classic client"

Science wise, we are to expect some pretty big results very soon, with many research papers to be published after peer review is completed. Vijay comments -

"In particular, results on Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and some other surprises in the works"

So there you go guys, the real reason we are all folding hasn't been forgotten. Hopefully a lot can be learned from these future publicly-released research papers, and we can see the benefit gained from lending our CPU cycles!