When you listen the word supercomputer the first that strike your mind is a banquet hall sized building full of thousands of most powerful CPUs and endless RAM continuously processing data. You must have read and seen the prodigies of supercomputers. For decades various organizations have spent a really big money for development of Supercomputers.
But the people at Stanford University (Powerhouse of Computer Science) have make a really big impression by inducing such a productive project called Folding@home which is really processing faster than any other supercomputer that too without big investment.
What they have done is that they utilized Distributive computing for solving the most difficult problems.
Folding@home is a project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. Since it is the problem which can be only solved by Supercomputer level machine. So what they did is they created world's most powerful distributive computing solution by extracting PC's unused processing.


People from across the globe download and run software to contribute. The software is highly portable (even can utilize Play station 3. Whenever your machine is idle or when you are on break it start it collects data from project's server and process it using local machine's capabilities . The whole process is assisted by the software. The processing is then fed back to project's server. This project has given world one of its most powerful supercomputer.


There are currently 4,00,000 machines contributing to entire project. It has won tonnes of awards from most prodigious organizations including Guinness.
Various other projects have also been started on the same scheme. Some of the top listed are BONIC, SETI@Home, Einstein@Home and GIMPS.