You can help coronavirus research with folding@home

Folding@home is a distributed computing project run by Stanford University. The aim of the project is to examine how proteins fold and it does this using spare computing power.

We first wrote about folding@home in 2007, but with rising concern about coronavirus - and confirmation of the project's involvement in researching COVID-19 - now is a great time to revisit this project and lend some support.

The idea behind the project is around shared computing power. Lots of people have computers and a lot of the time those computers aren't doing anything - they're just sitting around with spare computational power. Folding@home takes advantage of that spare power to put it to a good cause - researching diseases.

It's a very technical thing - both in terms of how a distributed computing project works and investigating folding proteins, but fortunately you don't have to understand either of those things to lend your support, because it all happens in the background.

All you have to do is head over to the folding@home website and you can download the software for whatever platform you're on. You'll install a small programme that will connect to the back to the project and then start churning data.

The idea is that when you have millions of computers doing a little bit of work in the background, you have greater computational power at your disposal, which is a great benefit to researchers. 

The folding@home team has confirmed that it is supporting researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City to develop treatments for COVID-19. As part of an open science approach, findings are shared with other researchers, with the global goal of developing drugs or therapies to combat the coronavirus. Just click on the link above and you can do your bit.

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