With Coronavirus affecting hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and research for medical treatment still being done the folks at Stanford who run Folding@Home have made an announcement with their efforts (which you yourself can help with).
Folding@Home is a program from Stanford University. Since 2000 it has been used to aid research in cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases by simulating protein folding, and other types of molecular dynamics.
The program works by distributing very tiny sequences among a network of tens of thousands of high end personal Desktop PC’s, to compute on their systems, and upload the results back to Stanford. This allows them to use the processing power of all those willing to donate, rather than whatever the campus would themselves have available.
Earlier this week, the developers have released a wave of projects related to coronavirus (also known as COVID-19). This is focused on understand how the virus interacts with the ACE2 receptor (required for viral entry into human host cells), and how the researchers might be able to interfere with them through new therapeutic antibodies.
If you would like to use your own computer to help out, you can find the download link and installation guide here.
To focus on the coronavirus, all you need to do is make sure its set to fold on your GPU as well as CPU, and in the advanced tab the Cause Preference is set to Any. There is no dedicated coronavirus tab right now, but if you select it to Any it will automatically prioritize those projects.
As a bit of advice for those who are unfamiliar with programs like this or other really hardware intensive programs, this will make your system run hot. It might even cause system crashes, if you have an unstable overclock or a general lack of system stability.
While you can run this in the background while gaming, it will use every last bit of performance you have left over. This can lead to stutters or low frame rates. You can set it to use a certain portion of your CPU if you fiddle with it enough, and you can set it to only use enough of your system that the PC does not blare all night long at full fan speed.
The coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) has affected many worldwide, from businesses with offices in China, Japan, and public gatherings and events. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This includes the postponement and cancellation of GDC, and E3 2020.
The Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering are mapping the virus’ spread [1, 2]. As of this time of writing, there have been over 145,100 confirmed cases worldwide, and over 5,400 deaths. Almost 70,300 people have made a “total recovery.” On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak “can be categorized as a pandemic.”
In addition earlier today President of the United States Donald Trump has declared a national emergency due to the outbreak and has mobilized the full resources of the U.S. Federal Government to combat the virus and its economic effects.
Image: Twitter
