We are experiencing a surreal situation, suspended between fear and anguish, because of the most devastating global pandemic of the last few decades. The Corona Virus has entered our lives, more or less, and has literally changed them. Nothing will be as before, at least until an effective vaccine arrives.
That’s why the time has come to use your computing power (or to move the one dedicated to cryptocurrency mining) to defeat this terrible enemy that passes under the code name of COVID-19.
The time has come to fight, let’s do it without fear on Linux, Mac or Windows
We can help defeat the COVID-19 virus, thanks to the Folding@home platform. It is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design and other types of molecular dynamics.
To date, the project uses the unused resources of personal computers owned by volunteers from around the world and, thanks to it, thousands of people contribute to success against diseases of all kinds. Given the terrible historical period, the attention of the Folding@home computational platform immediately shifted to issues related to the Coronavirus.
After an initial announcement on how Folding@home is bringing together researchers from all over the world who are working to better understand COVID-19, an update has been made with projects ready to be elaborated. These projects were briefly only in the beta version but are now already available to everyone, even if, at the moment, they only support the calculation through the GPU.
NOTE: they’re only for GPU right now and they will soon be available to be run on both a GPU and CPU.
Here the update to the COVID-19 related projects and below the list:
- 11741: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor-binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2.
- 11746: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor-binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2 (alternative structure to 11741).
- 11742: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease in complex with an inhibitor.
- 11743: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) protease – potential drug target.
- 11744: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor-binding domain trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody.
- 11745: Coronavirus SARS-CoV (SARS causing virus) receptor-binding domain mutated to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) trapped by a SARS-CoV S230 antibody.
Find the version of the software you prefer and get started. Downloading Folding@home is completely free, easy to install and safe to use. It is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows; and it is really easy to use, practically you have nothing special to do, just install the applications.
So, it’s time to join Folding@home and donate your compute power when you’re not using it to fight COVID-19. You can also find wonderful statistics and teams you can join if you’re interested. My team is r/Amd and the team number is 236734, it is the AMD Reddit users team, so please come and join. The You can now use your AMD (or Nvidia) GPU to take up the fight against COVID-19 with Folding@home post inspired me to assemble this article. Obviously, you can also use Nvidia GPUs and Intel CPUs, this no matter.
Also, check the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak on the World Health Organization website and visit r/Coronavirus on Reddit for the latest news to monitor the spread of the disease COVID-19, declared a pandemic PHEIC.
Uninstall Folding@home applications
For Macintosh and Windows users, the best way is to follow the system-wide procedures to uninstall applications as usual. For Linux users, just only a few commands from the terminal.
Open a terminal window and enter the command appropriate for your version of Linux:
Fedora:
su -c 'yum remove fahclient fahcontrol fahviewer'
OpenSUSE:
sudo zypper rm fahclient fahcontrol fahviewer --clean-deps
Ubuntu:
sudo dpkg -P fahclient fahcontrol fahviewer
Press ‘Enter’ and enter the password when prompted.
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