During the COVID-19 lockdown I’ve been trying to keep as helpful as possible with what I have to hand while avoiding my office. While closed for any non-emergency work I’ve donated several laptops to local charities, done some much needed fund-raising for Refugee Action and put my PC to task by putting its processing power towards helping scientists around the world to better understand COVID-19.
If you’re unaware of what the Folding@home project is, it’s a distributed computing project dedicated to understanding protein folding. It also recently reached an exaFLOP in computing power which is an incredible achievement in its self, meaning the project now beats the computing capacity of many of the top super computers around the world. It feels great to be a part of that effort, and anybody can join in with it too!
The Folding@home project not only works towards COVID-19 research, it’s been going for many years now helping scientists to understand all sorts of diseases and cancers. If you’re interested in joining the effort in assisting with this research and donating some computing power by running a very simple program you can download the client from the Folding@home website. It would be wonderful if you could join me in this!