Folding at Home: Put Your GPUs to Work to Fight COVID-19
Folding at Home Project recruits idle GPUs and personal computers to simulate virus behavior.
Crowdsourced distributed computing project joins the fight against Covid-19.
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March 19, 2020
Do you know that the powerful GPU in your gaming machine or workstation could be put to use in the fight against COVID-19?
Folding@home, a distributed computing project to research protein dynamics, is now devoting its resources to simulate the dynamics of COVID-19, the virus behind the current global outbreak.
On March 15, Greg Bowen, the project's codirector, wrote, “We’re simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities ... Downloading Folding@home and helping us run simulations is the primary way to contribute.”
Chances are, your computer is sitting idle at various times in the day as you sleep, take a shower, or watch Netflix (a popular activity for those under lockdown to stem the virus's spread). If you're part of the project, then your unused computing cycles during those times become part of the distributed computing infrastructure to simulate and render COVID-19's behavior.
“While you keep going with your everyday activities, your computer will be working to help us find cures for diseases like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and many others,” Folding@home explains.
The call is particularly relevant to those operating hardware with powerful GPUs.
“GPUs have the possibility to perform an enormous number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) ... After much work, we have been able to write a highly optimized molecular dynamics code for GPU’s, achieving a 20x to 40x speed increase over comparable CPU code for certain types of calculations,” wrote Folding@home.
The call from Folding@home is answered by PC Master Race, an online computer enthusiast community. The PC Master Race now has a dedicated page to direct members to the Folding@home project.
GPU maker NVIDIA redistributed the message from its GeForce Twitter account (see below).
PC Gamers, let’s put those GPUs to work.
Join us and our friends at @OfficialPCMR in supporting folding@home and donating unused GPU computing power to fight against COVID-19!
Learn more → https://t.co/EQE4u7xTZT pic.twitter.com/uO0ZCq8PEv— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) March 13, 2020
To download the app and join the project, go to this link.
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About the Author
Kenneth Wong is Digital Engineering’s resident blogger and senior editor. Email him at kennethwong@digitaleng.news or share your thoughts on this article at digitaleng.news/facebook.
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