Want to help in the battle against the novel coronavirus? You can put your PC’s graphics processor to work with Folding@home. You’ll join an army of computers running calculations to help scientists understand the virus.
How Folding@home Works
Folding@home is a distributed computing project that’s been around since the year 2000. It’s named after “protein folding.” If you install the software and join a project, it will run in the background and use spare graphics processing (GPU) power to run calculations. Your PC will be one of the hundreds of thousands of PCs running these calculations, all working together.
The software has previously been used to help find cures to cancer, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, influenza, and many other diseases. Now, Folding@home is helping scientists understand the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. As Folding@home director Greg Bowman explains, a better understanding of the virus could aid in the development of life-saving drugs.
In other words, you can put your PC’s GPU to work crunching numbers that will help scientists better understand and fight the novel coronavirus. You can read specifics about how Folding@home is “simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities” on the project’s website.
This work is GPU-dependent and requires NVIDIA or AMD graphics hardware. It will work best on computers with powerful graphics hardware.
Full article and install instructions at HowToGeek
