The project, called Folding@home, is a distributed computing project which was launched on October 1, 2000 by Stanford University
"Distributed computing" allows the computing power of thousands of anonymous users to speed up scientific projects.The Stanford University team makes a list of calculations (mathematical simulations) to be worked out and a server allocates these calculations to different users who have previously downloaded a tiny software. Stanford thus benefits from a huge computing power (equivalent to a few thousand expensive supercomputers), power which is donated freely by the project members.
Users simply download an application that runs protein-folding simulations on their desktop computers when the systems are idle.
Wow, that's pretty cool. Thanks for the explanation. (and for not getting mad at my sarcasm. :-)