Dilip Kuner
IT’S time to fight back against the coronavirus – and you can do your bit.
Anyone with a PC that has a dedicated graphics card can help researchers fight against the deadly pandemic.
A research project has been set up using Folding@Home technology to harness the power of the world’s personal PCs into a supercomputer offering vast processing power.
PC owners – whether it is an Apple, Windows or Linux-based model – can download software from the Folding@Home site.
This allows spare GPU (graphics card) cycles of thousands of computers to simulate protein folding and computational drug design.
This capability is now being used to research COVID-19 by using simulations to investigate a protein’s ‘moving parts’. This will help scientists understand how the virus operates and hopefully help lead to a treatment.
The project was founded in October 2000 at Stanford University in the USA with the aim of aiding research into diseases.
It has been used to help researchers investigating cancer, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other diseases.
The simulations scientists use need massive computational power and the Folding@Home team now want to use the capabilities of home PCs around the world to tackle the coronavirus virus.
To help, you can downloadthe software from the Folding@Home website.
While computers with a dedicated GPU are the only ones that can help COVID-19 simulations at the moment, the Folding@Home team is working on a CPU solution too, but no timeline has been given.
