Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for disease research, allows you to "donate" your unused computing power to the researchers looking for Covid-19 (Coronavirus) therapies or cures.

Similar to a new online puzzle game that crowdsources users' attempts to design a protein that could block the spread of COVID-19, this effort attempts to alleviate the massive computing strain that goes into modeling such solutions.

You can use your current machine to run the simple software (which will pull computing power while the device is idle) or power up an old laptop to do the job.

You probably should have recycled your old laptop (or sold it for parts) a long time ago. Instead, it's collecting dust under your bed right now.

But here's the good news: As long as you can still turn it on and connect to the internet, you can use the hunk of junk to help out researchers currently pouring tons of resources into finding a COVID-19 vaccine. It's all about computing power, and even if your MacBook isn't the fastest, it still has some juice.

Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding—a necessary biological hoop to jump through to create a vaccine—has built a simple software program that you can download to "donate" your leftover computing power to COVID-19 researchers.

The project, founded by Dr. Vijay Pande, is part of the Stanford University Departments of Chemistry and Structural Biology, as well as the Stanford University Medical Center.

"By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers [are] working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies," Greg Bowman, director of the Folding@Home Consortium, wrote in a blog post.

"The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs," he added.

Distributed Disease Research

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Since 1999, Pande's lab has been pushing the envelope in computing power for research purposes. While at first it didn't seem like his lab could benefit from distributed computing, the scientists discovered a statistical technique that would allow them to reap its benefits.

Pande says the calculations his lab wanted to do at the time "would take about a million days on a fast processor." But if the lab had access to 100,000 processors, he thought, it could complete a given computational task in just 10 days.

That's exactly the essence of distributed computing, which is just jargon for splitting up an arduous computing task so that many, many machines can contribute and get the job done more quickly. According to IBM, a distributed computer system uses multiple software components (here, the Folding@Home program) on multiple computers, run as a single system.

So why not use a supercomputer for these kinds of simulations? Pande says it's still difficult to run atomic-level simulations on the machines—plus, they're really expensive to build and operate. "The few supercomputers that do perform molecular simulations have been specifically designed for the purpose, and all of them are several orders of magnitude slower than Folding@Home," he says.

Folding@Home has been using this method for years. Currently, its overarching mission is to use distributed computing to simulate the misfolding that causes Alzheimer's Disease in hopes of finding a cure, though the Covid-19 research is its primary focus at the moment, given its vicious spread across the globe. At the moment, the virus has infected at least 94,300 people across 77 countries.

Protein Folding

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Distributed computing is a beneficial framework for finding a COVID-19 vaccine because protein-folding simulations are one of the most time-consuming applications in biology. Proteins—the workhorse of the cell—can take on various shapes as they wiggle around, folding and unfolding and making it increasingly difficult to predict how they'll interact and bind to receptors.

In the case of Covid-19, the infection occurs when a protein on the surface of the virus binds to a receptor protein in a pair of human lungs. This protein is called the spike protein, and the receptor is known as ACE2.

Scientists have already developed a therapeutic antibody that can block the COVID-19 protein from binding to a receptor site on a lung cell, but to create antibodies or small molecules for a vaccine, researchers must understand all of the possible shapes the viral spike protein can fold into, as it impacts how it will bind to the ACE2 receptor that causes the viral infection.



💻 How to Install Folding@Home

Visit Folding@Home's website and download the program as you would any other kind of software. The recommended installation package should show up automatically, based on whether you access the page from a Windows, Linux, or Mac. However, you can try out this list of alternate downloads if the correct software isn't showing up.

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