Service computing for hobbyists

Folding Farmer is a service for Folding @ Home, the protein folding distributed computing project. Instead of downloading the @home client and running it on your own machine, you can subscribe to Folding Farmer and utilize their computing cluster to process work units on your behalf.

Because the Folding @ Home project assigns credit to people who donate computer cycles to the project, there is a competition to see who can complete the most work units. This has turned the project into a hobby for some. If you like building computer systems Folding @ Home gives you an outlet for all of that processing power.

Folding Farmer caters to people who, for whatever reason (space, time, energy^*, ability) cannot set up their own clusters yet still want to donate to the Folding @ Home project. With Folding Farmer, you can subscribe to a highly-optimized node (consisting of a dual core, 64-bit processor) that will run the @Home client 24/7.

While services like Amazon EC2 or the Sun Grid provide on-demand computing for businesses and scientific research, this is utility computing for hobbyists.