The main aim to the project is to reverse engineer the data produced by the Folding@home client and write a program that will serve as a user interface to display information derived from it. Folding@home is a distributed programming project run by Stanford University.

With Distributed or 'Cloud' Computing becoming more and more popular, systems are becoming distributed in nature. With the extra complexity involved, how is software going to become easy to use for the user?

The system that this project is to be based upon, Folding@home, studies the "folding" and "mis-folding" of chemical compounds or "proteins" to help research cures for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and certain types of cancer.

In order to address the problem of a lack of understanding by the user about what data the client produces; a Java program will be produced to enable the extraction of information from the Folding@home client and display it to the end user in an easily understandable manner. To achieve this the Java program will need to be able to do two main tasks. Firstly it will be required to extract raw binary data from older clients and secondly it will connect to the new Folding@home API for future Clients.

The expected result to this project is to make the Folding@home project more accessible by providing relevant information to the user in order to educate them on what they are making a contributing to. It will subsequently make the Folding@home client easier to set up use on a day-to-day basis.

The current Folding@home client is a complex piece of software; in order to achieve the goal of reverse engineering its data files, extensive research will need to be conducted about its inner workings to complete this project successfully.