Folding@home Has Over 470 petaFLOPS Fighting COVID-19
Mike Sanders / 4 years ago
A little over a week ago we reported how the research company Folding@Home was offering people a unique opportunity to get involved in finding a cure for the Coronavirus (COVID-19). How could you do this? Well, essentially acting in the same way as a cryptocurrency miner, by ‘loaning’ them the power of your CPU and/or GPU, it would run algorithms attempting to find a protein combination that could stop the disease in its tracks.
Well, while no cure has been found yet, the team has reported something more than a little encouraging. Thanks to user efforts, it now has over 470 petaFLOPS of donated hardware working to find the cure!
Amazing! @foldingathome now has over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power. To put that in perspective, that’s more than 2x the peak performance of the Summit super computer!
— Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) March 20, 2020
Folding@home Helps You Fight the Coronavirus From Your Home
So, how does it work? Well, you install the application onto your PC and through the power of your PC components, it will look to run various protein simulations. From this, it is hoped that (largely through ruling out the results that don’t work) a combination can be determined that will prove effective against the virus.
If you want to learn more about Folding@Home, you can check out their website here! – Alternatively, if you just want to download the application and start your good deed, you can visit the page here!
How Can I Get Involved?
After downloading the application, while ‘generally’ running, your PC will be used for all manner of research. If you want to set it to specifically work on the Coronavirus, however, you need to ‘create an identity’ and enter a specific code!
Team Number – 162130
With this code in place, your PC will then starting fighting for a cure for COVID-19 and, presuming you’re not using your PC for gaming at the same time, you can even just let this plod along in the background. I promise you, you’ll barely notice anything happening!
So, check it out, spread the word, and let’s show the world what PC enthusiasts can do!
What do you think? Have you joined this project? If so, how many points have you earned so far? – Let us know in the comments!
