With the coronavirus running around causing many headaches for consumers and industry, it would be useful for professionals to get all the help they can get. These professionals around the world are buried in their data as they crunch through it all looking for any answer to the growing pandemic, and you can help contribute to their efforts.
You might have heard of the program called Folding@Home, which involves software that you download to your computer that lets your computer join into a network of computers just like yours, essentially building a massive cloud that works together to crunch this data for scientists and professionals looking for cures and other helpful information surrounding things like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and more. You can set it to work in the background when the system is idle (when you aren’t actively using it) so that it doesn’t bother you, and it will crunch through various projects sent to it using your CPU and GPU (if your GPU is supported), which can add incredible power to the overall effort. It then sends the results back into the cloud and gets to work on the next project.
Now, that same program is being used to offer assistance towards finding any useful information that can allow professionals to get ahead of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and develop a vaccine and/or cure and put a stop to it’s spread.
“This initial wave of projects focuses on better understanding how these coronaviruses interact with the human ACE2 receptor required for viral entry into human host cells, and how researchers might be able to interfere with them through the design of new therapeutic antibodies or small molecules that might disrupt their interaction.” – John Chodera, Folding@Home
All you have to do is visit their site here and download their software. The initial download link is for Windows, but you can click on alternative downloads to find options for Mac or Linux as well. When you see a drop-down for what diseases to focus on, make sure you choose “any” because coronavirus isn’t in the list just yet (application-side) until they launch a new version of the software openly. However, you can download the beta from here, which does have COVID-19 in the filter list finally.
Either way, even if you download the normal version of the app and have “any” selected, it is still spending most of the time working on coronavirus since these projects have been listed in the back-end by professionals with the highest priority so that they are sent out most frequently.
FAQ: Will this affect my monthly bandwidth?: When it comes to data usage (for those concerned), many have asked if folding is going to hurt any monthly data cap they may have with their ISP. The answer is no. If you have a powerful enough machine (modern and high-end), you will likely see around 1-2GB worth of data transferred within a month. Bandwidth is only used to download a project, and then upload it back when you are done crunching the numbers. They are typically small in size (in the MB’s) It wouldn’t come anywhere close to hurting your monthly cap unless you build a farm of high-end servers (which, likely isn’t going to be your case).
Other companies like NVIDIA and the CDC have been actively pushing this to get people involved with this, as it offers a huge benefit to scientists/professionals when it comes to computing power. There is nothing like building a friendly/legitimate botnet of computers to offer a huge super processing initiative for fighting disease and saving lives! — and they can use whatever help you can give.
You can read more about what they are using this information for here.
Update: Want to join our team after you’ve got the wheels rolling? Our team # is 252499
Last Update: 04/29/2020
