You Can Help Stop COVID-19, All You Need Is A Computer

Logan Larrick

More stories from Logan Larrick

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Logan Larrick

Bulldog Barker staff member Logan Larrick’s stats on Folding@home as of April 20.

The coronavirus is everywhere now, school is online and what can you do to help? Well if you don’t want to go outside if you have a computer and an internet connection you can help. Folding@home is a project created by Stanford University’s Chemistry Department that uses the computing power of thousands of computers to run simulations of protein folding to help combat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer and COVID-19. 

 

To further explain what protein folding is about, the Folding@home website states,Folding refers to the way human protein folds in the cells that make up your body. We rely on the proteins to keep us healthy and they assemble themselves by folding. But when they misfold, there can be serious consequences to a person’s health.”

The servers that run the research send a task to different computers and after they are done the computer sends them back and they are looked at by the scientists that are studying the disease. Though this sounds complicated the user does not have to do anything but turn on their computer to start this whole process. So far through Folding@home’s research, they have found several drug candidates which may be able to fight Alzheimer’s and cancer. Recently this program has become more widely used due to COVID-19 and has grown substantially reaching an exaflop of processing power, 10x the power of IBM Summit, making it one of the most powerful supercomputers. In order to help, go to https://foldingathome.org to learn more and join the thousands of folders.