Are you at home and don’t know how to do it? Would you like to help out looking for a vaccine to treat COVID-19? Do you have a computer, even an old one?
Okay … Have you ever heard of grid computing?
Well, if you want to help fight the Corona Virus COVID-19 you can participate in Folding @ Home by going to this address: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
How to install it?
It’s simple, just install the client on both Mac Os X and Windows and you can participate in the calculation distributed together with millions of other computers all over the world, making your calculation resources available to speed up the study of diseases such as cancer and the alzheimer, parkinson and now also covid-19 and develop new therapies.
What is Folding @ home
Folding @ home was born from Stanford University’s Pande Lab to study the process of folding proteins, including now also COVID-19.
This study tries to understand how proteins reach the final three-dimensional structure and the various wrong folds.
You can decide to perform the calculation distributed anonymously or through your username or by participating in an existing team or creating one among your friends, or grouping your home computers.
But what does this have to do with COVID-19?
The projects that with a numbering ranging from 1141 to 11746 (here more details), try to understand how the surface receptors of the ACE2 lung cells cause the virus to enter and consequently to start the infection with COVID-19.
How does it work?
Once you have installed the client that you will download from the Folding @ home site, you must run the FAHControl.app application. You have to choose “Any disease” and you want to donate your calculation capacity for COVID-19.
You can choose to use a Light or Full version, increasing the computing load for your GPU and CPU. In full mode of course, if you keep the client working continuously, your computer will be put under strain and you will hear the fans increase in rotation to cool better. I recommend you use it in light mode on a laptop in order not to weigh it down too much.
You can choose whether to make it work always, even while using the computer or only when the computer is in stand-by.
If my computer doesn’t support it?
Nothing is lost, there are still possibilities to fight COVID-19. In fact there is also a dedicated version for VMware (virtual machine emulator) that was released on March 2020. You can find more information here: VMware appliance
How can it be part of your team?
If you want to participate in the research with me .. you can simply add 248815 in the configuration of FAHControl.app in Team Number. In this way you will join my research team whose statistics you can also see here: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/248815
The calculation doesn’t seem to start …
I also have this problem with one of the machines … As you can see from this research on the Folding @ home forum: https://foldingforum.org/search.php?keywords=No+WUs+available+for+this+ configuration if you go to the LOG, you will find lines with the words “No WUs available for this configuration”.
“No WU available for this configuration” means that there are currently no work units queued for you. This is not a problem on your part, but simply the result of the unexpected 10x expansion of the Folding @ home user base in the last month, which has led to the consumption of work units sometimes faster than they can be generated.
Research teams are bringing new servers online and other projects in the queue, so we hope the servers can keep up with the demand soon. Leave everything running and it will start working again when it becomes available.
In practice, many users, like us, have made their computers available and have exhausted all the calculations for the projects entered, soon researchers will insert new projects to elaborate. You can read the original post here: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=32124&p=316897&hilit=No+WUs+available+for+this+configuration#p316897
So don’t log out and just wait for new projects to be released by the researchers.
I consume too much current!
Regardless that if you want to do charity, you should consider spending electricity, let’s do two maths … if you consume 600 Watts with your computer at maximum performance, considering € 0.23 per KiloWatt now, you should spend about € 100 per month more electricity. Not so much if you want to do charity. Consider that 600 watts are now the consumption of a gaming computer.
Sources
Folding @ home challenges the pandemic: your PC’s resources against Coronavirus
FOLDING @ HOME UPDATE ON SARS-COV-2 (10 MAR 2020)
Folding @ home COVID-19 efforts
Folding @ home statistics for KLECKNER’S TEAM
