What is Folding@home?

Folding@home is a distributed computing network for performing biomedical research. Its intent is to help further understand and develop cures for a range of diseases. Their current priority is understanding the behavior of COVID-19 and the virus that causes COVID-19. This article will show you how you can get involved by donating your computer’s idle time.

Sounds cool, how do I help?

In order to donate your computational power to Folding@home, download the FAHClient package from this page. Once you’ve downloaded the package, open your Downloads folder and double click it to open. For instance, on standard Fedora Workstation, this opens GNOME Software, which prompts you to install the package.

Click install and enter your password to continue from here.

How to start Folding@home

Folding@home starts folding as soon as it is installed. In order to control how much CPU/GPU is using you must open the web control interface, available here.

The interface contains information about what project you are contributing to. In order to track “points,” the scoring system of Folding@home, you must set up a user account with Folding@home.

Tracking your work

Now that everything’s done, you may be wondering how you can track the work your computer is doing. All you need to is request a passkey from this page. Enter your email and your desired username. Once you have received the passkey in email, you can enter that into the client settings.

Click on the Change Identity button, and this page appears:

You can also put in a team number here like I have. This allows your points to go towards a group that you support.

Enter the username you gave when you requested a passkey, and then enter the passkey you received.

What next?

That’s all there is to it. Folding@home runs in the background automatically on startup. If you need to pause or lower how much CPU/GPU power it uses, you can change that via the web interface linked above.

You may notice that you don’t receive many work units. That’s because there is currently a shortage of work units to distribute due to a spike of computers being put onto the network. However, different efforts are emerging all the time.

You can visually see the spike in computers on the network from last year at the same time to 4/4/2020

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.