Put your spare CPU/GPU resources to work from home against SARS-CoV-2 and join the AILS NTUA folding team

Folding@home (fah) is a distributed computing project that started in 2000, named after “Protein Folding.” The Protein Folding Problem is the obstacle that scientists confront when they try to predict 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence. Although it is known that a given sequence of amino acids almost always folds into a 3D structure with certain functions, it is impossible to predict, with high precision, the exact folding pattern.

If you install the fah client and join a project, it runs in the background and uses your spare CPU or GPU power. This way, your PC contributes its computing power along with hundreds of thousands of other PCs to run specific protein folding simulations.

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The software has previously been used to help find cures to cancer, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, influenza, and many other diseases. Now, fah is helping scientists understand the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

Folding@home recently announced that, due to the enthusiastic response to their COVID-19 initiative, the cumulative compute performance of active CPUs and GPUs (which have returned Work Units within the last 50 days) participating in fah exceeds 2 ExaFLOPS, which is 10 times faster than the performance of IBM’s Summit supercomputer, benchmarked for 148.6 PetaFLOPS (figures updated).

Start folding

  • Install Folding@Home for your platform
  • In the "Cause Preference" setting, select "Any." Your resources will then most probably be assigned to a CoV-2 related project
  • Start folding. Of course, you have full control, and you can start/stop folding at any time

Join the AILS NTUA folding team

While you are folding, you gain points. If you wish, you can join or create a team and earn points for your team. The ranking of all teams is displayed in a leaderboard. AILS NTUA team number is 260843