By Lawrence Abrams BleepingComputer.com
March 9, 2020 01:36 PM 0
The Folding@home distributed computing project is now utilizing donated CPU cycles to research the Coronavirus (COVID-19) virus.
Folding@home is a project founded by Pande Lab at Stanford University where users donate CPU cycles through a software client to simulate protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics to learn more about diseases and how to protect against them.
At the end of February, the Folding@home project announced that they are joining other COVID-19 researchers around the world to learn more about the virus and create potential drug 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 us 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," the Folding@home project stated in a blog post.
If you have a computer laying around not doing anything or want to donate your active computer's idle CPU processing power to researching the COVID-19 virus, you can do so by downloading and installing the Folding@home client.
Once installed, right-click on the Folding@home icon in your Windows system tray to configure how much CPU power you wish to donate. The intensity of your CPU utilization can be set to 'Full', 'Medium', or 'Light', with Light being the lightest CPU load.
Folding@home optionsIf you plan on using your computer while donating cycles, I recommend you select the 'Light' option.
If you want to control Folding@home using a web interface, you can select the 'Web Control' option as shown in the image above. This will open a web page showing your current work-in-progression, your settings, and the project you are contributing are your CPU cycles to.
Folding@HomeIf you are configured to support research fighting 'Any Disease' then your CPU cycles will be randomly select among different projects, including Coronavirus/COVID-19 research.
You can determine what project you are contributing to by looking at the project number and looking it up here.
If you are contributing to projects 11741, 11742, or 11743 then your donated CPU cycles are being used for Coronavirus research.
H/T Rob Joyce
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