The Folding@Home distributed grid computing project has set its sights on analysing the Coronavirus.

Whether you have a powerful CPU or GPU up for the task, you should be able to contribute to dissecting the proteins involved and contribute a bit of your electricity bill and processing power to calculating the means necessary to analyse the proteins.

Download the client and set it up however you want to (whether you want it to pause when your processor gets too busy, too hot, or just when idle while you have the computer on).

You can find more detailed information here and here. There's a Windows client attached to this post.

Current Corona specific projects (you don't need to do anything to get them, the software will do it for you):

 

14530/14531 Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease - potential drug target

14328 - Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease - potential drug target

11741: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2.

11746: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2 (alternative structure to 11741).

11742: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease in complex with an inhibitor.

11743: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease – potential drug target.

11744: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor binding domain trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody.

11745: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor binding domain mutated to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody.

 

All these are under the default "any" selection in settings. We don't currently have a coronavirus specific selection, so all related projects will be grouped up and sent under the ANY setting to your PC as needed!

You can download and install it for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Join the element14 Community Folding@Home team - the Team Number is 240845

You should be able to request a passkey if you want to setup your own username, though it may take a while before you receive it via email.

When the APIs are back up we should be able to see aggregated team stats, but at least for now lets get processing!

Great work by those who have contributed so far!

Edit:

If you're not receiving work units, it's because the Folding@Home servers are currently overloaded with requests - you will receive work units once they've upgraded the server's capacity!

You can see how the increase in workload has amassed here.

Edit: Now with STATS

We can view the element14 Community team stats here or here

Here's a snapshot of them as of 7th February 01:47 GMT

Update: Rosetta@Home Now has ARM 64-bit Support

Those of you who own an ARM based single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4 should now be happy to know that Rosetta@Home can let you process coronavirus proteins to support the effort using a 64-bit operating system. Any ARM based processor that has 2gByte of RAM and supports 64-bit should work, so long as you're running a kernel/operating system that supports and identifies as 64bit. To get this working on Raspbian you have to do a bit of configuration altering (thanks to Rosetta@home on Raspbian Pi 4 ).

To get this working, you need to have a 64-bit operating system. You can either use something like Ubuntu Server 64bit for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 here. Or you can do the following to allow it under Raspbian:

$ sudo vim /boot/config.txt

Add the following line to the end of the file:

arm_64bit=1

You should then be able to run the following command:

$ uname -a

Which the response should be something like:

Linux raspberrypi 4.19.113-v8+ #1300 SMP PREEMPT Thu Mar 26 17:04:40 GMT 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

You'll need to register for an account on BOINC/Rosetta@Home here, and make sure you join the element14 Community team. Join 'E14community' after you've created an account, teamid 19110.

You can install BOINC on Ubuntu and Raspbian by executing:

$ sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinctui boinc-manager

Now, if you're using Raspbian you need to do the following:

$ sudo vim /etc/boinc-client/cc_config.xml

And add the following lines before the last </cc_config> tag:

<options>

<alt_platform>aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu</alt_platform>

</options>

You can add more than one alt_platform line here, it's possible that your Raspbian might identify better as one of the following:

• aarch64-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
• arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
• aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Save the file, and reboot your Raspberry Pi. If you're using Ubuntu Server 64bit you do not need to do the above steps aside from the sudo apt-get install.

Picking up Work Units

If you're setting this up over SSH (like I am) , or bring up a terminal in the desktop, type in:

$ boinctui

Then hit 'enter' at the first prompt. Then press F9

Using your arrow keys on the keyboard, navigate to the menu 'Projects' and hit enter on 'Add Project' and choose 'Rosetta@Home'

Choose 'existing user' because you'll have already setup an account and joined a team. Then type in your username and password.

Once you've typed in your username and password, the software will run a benchmark

However you may not be able to run the Rosetta@Home COVID-19 work units in Raspbian because something in the setup of BOINC has gone awry or you haven't enabled arm_64bit=1 in config.txt and you'll get an error message like this:

"This project doesn't support computers of type arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf". I encountered this problem and I had to do the following. Though I did have a better experience using BOINC Manager from the GUI rather than going for boinctui straight away. If you find that no matter what you do, BOINC still throws 'arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf' then try running:

$ sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove boinc-client boinctui boinc-manager

Then say 'yes' to the prompt that appears, and then run:

$ sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager boinctui boinc-client-opencl libgl1-mesa-glx

Then instead of using boinctui, follow the steps using BOINC Manager which you'll find under 'System Tools' in the Raspbian desktop.

Then you can use either the GUI or Terminal version

There are also stats for this team here and here ! Looks like it's only me so far

We've just passed the 900,000 unit milestone on Rosetta@Home! Great work !

Remember: every contribution helps!

Message was edited by: Christopher Stanton- Updated Stats