Folding@Home — Join The Fight Against COVID-19
Folding@Home — Join The Fight Against COVID-19
Want to join the fight against COVID-19 and don’t know how because you’re not a doctor, scientist, etc.? There’s a great way anyone can help. You can donate unused computing power from your computer to Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, focusing on disease research including COVID-19.
Some info from their website includes the following:
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.
Folding@home is a project focused on disease research. The problems we’re solving require so many computer calculations — and we need your help to find the cures!
The Folding@home software allows you to share your unused computer power with us — so that we can research even more potential cures.
Folding refers to the way human protein folds in the cells that make up your body. We rely on the proteins to keep us healthy and they assemble themselves by folding. But when they misfold, there can be serious consequences to a person’s health.
(Distributed computing is defined on their FAQ for those unfamiliar with the concept.) Basically anyone with a computer can join at no cost except for a few pennies on monthly utility bills. F@H is also interested in multi-core, multi-GPU rigs, although any computer is fine and would be appreciated. I have a custom designed and custom built Falcon Northwest MACH V PC with an 18-core/36-thread Intel i9–9980XE processor and multiple NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX Ti 11GB — Founders Edition GPUs. I started folding Tuesday AM and my first Work Unit was done in 4 minutes. Since then, I’ve added two more rigs (a custom designed and built iMac and a standard iMac) to form “TeamScott” (Join Me: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/264987) and I‘m thinking of adding two more custom designed and built PCs. In 2+ days, I completed 61 Work Units for 72,806 points, putting TeamScott at 44,675 out 252,943 teams! (Since I originally wrote this a short time ago, I’ve downsized how much of my computing power is devoted to F@H, as I’m a heavy multi-tasking user on many other projects on several computers. But you can set your computer’s power to Folding at Light, Medium or Full, depending on the machine’s ability and your use of it at the time. TeamScott’s current stats — with no added computers thus far — now stand at having completed 303 Work Units for 827,457 points which places the team now at 21,943 out of 253,324 teams.) It feels great to contribute and it likely will for you too. Anyone can participate along with organizations such Cisco, AMD, CERN, Intel, NVIDIA, Avast, Microsoft, etc. Go here to find out more and get involved: https://foldingathome.org/. Their FAQ, which is pretty helpful, can be found here: https://bit.ly/3dqxemk. Hope to see you there!
Originally published at http://hankrules2011.com on May 8, 2020.
