Coronavirus: Scientists are racing to find Covid-19 vaccine and you can help by Folding@Home

How can you help scientists and the world tackle covid-19 and coronavirus? By staying at home. That is one way. The other is by Folding@Home. Now, we are not talking of you folding yourself in comfortable bed and do social distancing. That helps too. But by the Folding @ Home we mean you helping scientists fold proteins fancy word for simulating basic proteins and find out how they behave within the coronavirus so that an effective vaccine can be created against the virus. This you can do through the covid-19 project at Folding@Home, a distributed computing project.

Now, this all sounds quite technical and in some ways it is. But not for regular users who can contribute to the project. To help scientists trying to create a vaccine for covid-19, all that people need to is install the Folding@Home software on their computer or laptop and then let it run as it simulate the virus proteins.

Viruses also have proteins that they use to suppress our immune systems and reproduce themselves, notes Folding@Home project on covid-19. To help tackle coronavirus, we want to understand how these viral proteins work and how we can design therapeutics to stop them.

Understanding proteins and simulating is best done with super computers, but there aren't enough super computers in the world for all the protein folding that needs to be. One solution is distributed computing, which lets anyone with a computer or laptop join a grid and then use the collecting computing power to do simulations.

Engineering and Scientific problems are often so difficult that we need to solve them on supercomputers (such as Archer, Summit, Sierra, etc). Problems like finding a cure for Covid-19 through realistic simulations are so challenging and compute-intensive that the combined computing power of topmost supercomputers in the world is less to find the solution quickly, writes Dr Lokesh Ragta, a CFD scientist in Scientific Computing Department at Daresbury Laboratory, UK. To share your resource, you just have to download the software Folding@home, install it, run the same and keep your computer running for as long as you can. That is it. This is all that is required from your side.

The software run Folding@Home on a computer can be downloaded from the project site (https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/). The covid-19 project at Folding@Home was announced a while ago and it already has millions of users from across the world contributed to the distributed computing. The project is supported by many big tech companies, including Intel, Google, Nvidia, Oracle and others.