I did some undergraduate research on this around 1999. At the time we were trying to prove that we could throw more firepower at the problem by building a beowu

I did some undergraduate research on this around 1999. At the time we were trying to prove that we could throw more firepower at the problem by building a beowulf cluster to solve the problem. After a bit of tweaking, we were able to get more performance than a single machine, but soon seti@home was released and to me at least the writing was on the wall that we were not taking the most optimal approach. In hindsight though, we were so far off from both an algorithmic perspective and a hardware perspective to actually achieving meaningful results. I am glad, 20 years later it seems real progress is being made. I haven't really followed the folding@home project in many many years, but its not clear to me much came out of it that was all that useful, at least not in practical terms.