Want to help fight COVID-19 with Folding@Home?

[#1]

Anyone seen this?

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that’s been around for about a decade now. It’s named after “protein folding.” If you install the software and join a project, it runs in the background and uses spare graphics processing (GPU) power to run calculations.

The initiative has joined researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies. By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies. The data you help generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs.

Unbelievably, the combined computational power from these efforts is now more powerful than the world's top 7 supercomputers combined!

I've just installed the client myself to do my bit as I've got a fair bit of GPU processing grunt sat idle. If anybody else fancies following suit, then I've created a Plusnet Community Team you can join. Team ID is 248929.

[#2]

Just joined and folding as I type.

[#3]

I'm not opposed to it however back in 2008 folding@home was a big thing for cancer - and has it produced a cure in 12 years? No.

So whats different about this virus? - We know soap, disinfectant etc is good against it and they're now having luck with HIV treatments...

[#4]

Has anything else produced a cure for cancer? 🤔

[#5]

It`s not about a "cure" ... it is about the computational POWER, reducing the processing times for whatever researchers are using it for...  making the cost of providing a "super computer" a " non -event"   thus saving money to put more research into  the problems, rather than paying for the hardware and software to go with it..

[#6]

Well done Bob Pullen for publicizing this.

Many people want to help!!

Really there should be a modest mention of this way to help in the general covid19 update messages from Plusnet.

The website   https://foldingathome.org/    is so good further links are hardly needed.

Some tips to avoid disappointment;

1. Sometimes there will be no work for your computer, it is created in batches, but if you leave the application running it will collect work when available and run it. This might be seconds, minutes or hours. This probably depends on time of day. I have seen waits of 4 minutes to two hours. The software is working properly.

2. Sometimes when there is no covid19 work available to do at the exact moment you request it your computer is given work on other projects like cancer for example. I have seen mostly covid19 work. The project number is displayed by the application. Here is an index to the projects; https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary  so you can confirm if you are working on Covid19.

Is it about finding treatment candidates.....?

https://foldingathome.org/2020/04/03/capturing-the-covid-19-demogorgon-aka-spike-in-action/

https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/

https://stats.foldingathome.org/project?p=14616

https://stats.foldingathome.org/project?p=16406

https://stats.foldingathome.org/project?p=13870

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding

[#7]

BTW from now onwards my points go to your team - team 248929

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/248929

Really it's about a chance to save many lives - not points.

[#8]

Note. The COVID19 projects include ones that use the computers CPU (Central Processing Unit - which every computer has), rather than one particular type of GPU (graphics prcessing unit - Nvidia type). So the application program has a very high chance of working on any reasonably up to date computer.