Help find a cure for COVID-19!

Well, now there’s a way for everyone to participate in this global fight against the coronavirus. The Folding@home project is a distributed computing project that aims to understand protein folding in the hope of finding cures for various diseases. It is led by a team of scientists from Washington University, in collaboration with many other research labs around the world.  Folding@home has now just added SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19) to its list of diseases it aims to find a cure for.

What can you do? Start folding!

It’s easy, just visit their website and download the Folding@home client; follow the step-by-step installation guide for your operating system, and you’re ready to start folding! The Folding@home client utilises unused computer resources to process calculations that are then sent back to the university to help them run simulations. You can either set up the client to run all the time, or only when your computer is idle. Your computer is almost never going to be idle, but with how much attention the project has attracted, you don’t need to have it run all the time. What I like to do is set it up to run continuously for a couple of hours a day and then set it on idle. This way I make sure I contribute a little bit every day.

To make things a little more fun, you can create your own team, and track statistics like the amount of work units processed and how your team ranks up against the rest of the world. We’ve set up a Folding@home team at our company to both help raise awareness within the company and to get some competitive action going in these hard times.

If you don’t want to set up a team of your own, feel free to join our BrightGen team by entering 252781 as your team number during setup.

 

Stay at home - Stay safe