People are Turning to the Folding at Home Project to Help Fight COVID-19

Folding at Home is a distributed computing platform that helps crack diseases by simulating protein dynamics by using volunteer’s personal computer resources. (Image credit: Folding at Home via Wikipedia)

Folding at Home has been gaining wide attention since the COVID-19 virus became a pandemic that spread across the globe. The project relies on computing resources from volunteers, which help scientists develop new therapeutics for any number of diseases by simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding - a physical process where a protein chain takes on its native 3D structure. The process is reproduced many times over to gain insight into its DNA, which can then be used to develop vaccines against a virus, in this case, the coronavirus.

As mentioned earlier, more people have donated their computer and game console resources since the pandemic hit. Some 700,000 have joined in recent weeks, and combined with others previously donating, accidentally succeeded in creating the world’s largest supercomputer! To put that into perspective- volunteers’ collective resources (CPU, GPU, etc.) achieved a speed of approximately 1.22 exaFLOPS by late March, which equates to the world’s first exaFLOP computing system. By April, that speed increased to 2.43 (x86) exaFLOPS, pushing the boundary even further, surpassing Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer, which used to be the fastest.

Join Team: e14Community and help the fight against the coronavirus and attribute to the point system and accelerate the needed research. (Image credit: element14)

Folding at Home also assesses user computing contributions to any project using a credit system, which is determined by benchmarking one or more work units from that particular project and the computer doing the folding. Each user receives base points for completing a work unit and can earn additional bonus points for reliably and rapidly completing units that are more resource-intensive or have higher priority. The point system attempts to provide credit with the value of scientific results. 

That said, the Folding at Home project allows volunteers to create or join teams, which combine the points earned from each team member, and promote friendly competition between individuals and teams to compute the most for that project. Doing so benefits the folding community and accelerates scientific research. Element14 has created a team to help drive the fight against the coronavirus, and already has a grand score of 127,473,894 and a work unit count of "12,503," I personally added 1,116,000 points, and counting, to that total! This gives the element14 team a ranking of 1257 out of 252958. Those interested in helping to push those numbers higher can join us at Team: e14Community. (Team number 240845)

Set your Processors to ANALYSE for the COVID-19 virus with Folding@Home or Rosetta@Home

http://twitter.com/Cabe_Atwell

It’s during times like these that inspire innovation.

In that spirit, the “Fighting Germs” contest is here to not only reward that innovation ─ but also give to other charities for those attempting the same thing! It’s fun, it’s beneficial.

They say the best time to plant a tree is thirty years ago. The next best time is today.