Use your servers or PCs to fold protein and fight COVID-19
Because of high unemployment rates and crashing stock markets, people want to save money rather than donate it. Thankfully, there’s a way to contribute to coronavirus solutions with investments that you’ve already made. Use your computer or server to fold protein and help scientists with medical research.
In the same way that people use their GPU to solve algorithms that are rewarded with crypto, you can use your processing power to simulate protein dynamics for biomedical scientists. You can either fold protein yourself or let your server host ‘jobs’ and hold data.
The project is called Folding@home and they are contributing to Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, cancer, COVID-19 and other medical conditions. Since the coronavirus pandemic, they have jumped from 30,000 to 400,000 contributors.
Has Folding@home accomplished anything?
Those who haven’t heard of protein folding before might wonder how effective it really is. Thankfully, there is published evidence implying that this project has helped scientists gather information.
“Protein misfolding in the cell is linked to an array of diseases, including cancers, cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, and numerous neurodegenerative disorders” – ScienceDirect
Computer aided drug design leverages computational power to perform research needed to make effective medicine. While Folding@home won’t be the end all answer for coronavirus solutions, it arms scientists with much needed research.
“Fold recognition, for studying sequence-structure homology between protein sequences and structures, are helpful for inferring binding sites and molecular functions” – Briefings in Bioinformatics, Volume 10, Issue 5
So while we are not qualified to tell you exactly how community folding will help the medical field, it is clear that there is logic and good intentions behind the process.
Host folding projects with a server
According to Folding@home, right now there is more need for servers to intake data than there is for volunteers to contribute computing power.
Folding@home recommends an 8-core CPU, 64gb ram, as much storage and possible and a gigabit internet connection. While this might be on the high end for personal computers, these components can be commonly found in a low tier server.
Unfortunately, running a Folding@home server isn’t as much of a plug and play process as completing ‘jobs’ on your computer. If your server is powerful enough to participate in this process, contact Folding@home directly to get set up.
Fold protein with personal computers
If you want to fold with your PC, it is possible to do on Mac, Linux and Windows. System requirements vary for each operating system, but they are very low and easy to meet.
You will be able to start folding in minutes with their quick start guide. All you need to do is download and run the installer, and create an identity. If you would like to contribute to a team, you can enter their team number.
If you are concerned about your energy or processing usage, you can use their application to manage what components it is utilizing and at which speed. This is a great project for someone who is sitting on a dormant mining rig as folding makes great use of multiple GPUs.
The best GPU is for folding, has historically been whatever the best overall GPU is at the time. This would currently be a NVIDIA RTX 2080 TI or NVIDIA Titan RTX.
It’s simple and you can stop at anytime
For those who aren’t comfortable tinkering with their computers, just know that this process is simple. All you need to do is download, install and enter a username. As long as you have a dedicated GPU on a modern computer, you will be able to contribute in a meaningful way.
Folding@home does not exist through advertisements or present any malware risk. Make sure you are downloading your software directly from foldingathome.org.
RackSolutions sends our best to those affected by and on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
