Folding@home: Fight Coronavirus with spare computer processing power!

[trainfanM]

Folding@home is a distributed computing project which uses the spare computer processing power of volunteers all around the world to help research and fight diseases. By pooling together all volunteers' computing power, Folding@home in-effect has one of the largest supercomputers in the world to work on medical problems!

Coronavirus (COVID-19) was just added to the list of diseases Folding@home is working on -- which includes Alzheimer's, Cancer, Huntington's, and Parkinson's.

Volunteers can download a "client program" for Mac, Windows, and Linux, install it, then leave it running while they perform other work. Folding@home then downloads part of a protein or molecular problem for your computer to work on in the background. When those calculations have been completed, the results are sent back to Folding@home, and part of a new protein or molecular problem is sent for your computer to work on.

MacRumors has a story on the basics of how to set up Folding@home on your computer. The Windows and Linux versions work in a similar way, so have a read!
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use...t-coronavirus/

Once the Folding@home client program is running on your computer, be sure the "Cause Preference" is set to "Any" in order to receive Coronavirus tasks to process -- it should be "Any" by default. High-priority tasks are assigned the "Any" category -- of which Coronavirus tasks are assigned to -- but you computer may also receive other high-priority tasks.

See this intro video to learn more about Folding@home and its director, Dr. Greg Bowman:
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/bowm...uting-project/




Folding@home Download Page
https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

See the left-column for Installation Guides for Windows, Linux, and Mac for more help
https://foldingathome.org/support/



Folding@home FAQ
https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/project-details/

Running Folding@home FAQ
https://foldingathome.org/support/fa...g-foldinghome/

The Folding@Home client program shows the project number it's currently working on. See this page to learn more about each individual project (click a project link on the page.)
https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

Folding@home works fine on your computer with its default settings, but you can customize it further.
https://foldingathome.org/support/fa...uration-guide/

Folding@home also has an optional "game" aspect to it: you can earn points and join teams.
https://foldingathome.org/support/fa...ams-usernames/



Cheers!
-- TFM

[trainfanM]

PS: Follow the latest on Folding@home from their twitter page:
https://twitter.com/foldingathome

[trainfanM]

The folks from Folding@home will hold a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session today (Thursday, March 19th, 2020) at 4 p.m. EST.

The AMA will be held here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/