How Can You Fight, or Fold, From Home?

As we all know, unless you have been living under a rock, there is quite the pandemic occurring globally due to COVID-19. Like all other viruses, it spreads by replicating its own DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid; a form of protein) in cells throughout the body of the animal that it was able to compromise. Thus, the science behind this spread is called protein growth. In order to create vaccines to fight against viruses like COVID-19, the protein growth would need to be calculated and/or simulated to quickly and efficiently create a cure or vaccine for the aforementioned virus. To substitute simulating protein growth a team could go about and continue to research the physical virus in a more traditional manner because, unfortunately, it takes an immense amount of compute power to quickly create simulations.

This is where the project known as Folding@Home comes in, and not only for COVID-19. For background, Folding@Home is a project that has been around since 2000 and it uses cluster compute technology to form a network of computers that, once all together, can be used in conjunction with each other to solve complicated mathematical operations, simulate protein growth, and many other tasks. In the past and even currently it is used for researching the process of protein folding in diseases like breast cancer, ebola, alzeimers, and various other diseases. The rest of the diseases that are researched with Folding@Home can be found at this link from the official website.

How powerful is the network of computers that Folding@Home has been able to create? So far, as of April 8th, the network is capable of a load that reaches 2.36 x86 exaFLOPS. Now you may be thinking, “What the hell is an exaFLOP?”, excuse the Doctor Brown reference. For reference, the fastest supercomputer (IBM Summit) is only capable of 200 petaFLOPS. In x86 exaFLOPS (to keep consistent measurements of power), the Folding@Home network is technically and approximately 5.9X faster than the IBM Summit which is the fastest supercomputer in the world. The current statistics of the Folding@Home project can be found here.

The *science* part of this article is over, but wait there is more. How can you help to contribute to this cause? Well, as long as you have a computer that runs Windows, macOS, or Linux, you are good to go! The system requirements can be found on Folding@Home's website, and this is the link. Folding@Home can be run at whatever load the user specifies and it only runs either when the user is not using the server (computer) or it can run lightly in the background. This makes running the software super easy and it might only lightly impact the performance of the computer it is running on.

Now that you know all of this, why don't you download Folding@Home? Yes, having your computer running all the time or even at a higher load for a period of time may increase your power bill. At the same time, you would be contributing to a greater cause. There are many "teams that support the Folding@Home project. These teams/clusters can be found on the statistics page of their website. Personally, I am a part of the LinusTechTips community and I have joined their team as of today. The information on how to join is found on their YouTube video post which I have linked right here.

This guide/tutorial is quite informative on what the Folding@Home project is all about and if you would like to learn more, I would highly recommend checking out this video. There are other videos and guides on Youtube and scattered across the internet on different sources that are also quite helpful, but I find this guide to be perfect for figuring out the first time setup. It definitely helps out when trying to setup a Folding server and there are a few tips there that may help out as well. Good luck "Folding" at Home, and stay safe.