Computing power devoted to finding treatments for Covid-19

Folding@home is a project that borrows your PC’s unused computing power to research treatments for the coronavirus. The system in place thanks to Folding@home has more computing power than the top 100 supercomputers combined.

It is capable of calculating 1,554 petaflops, making it about 10 times more powerful than Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

The project has been helping the medical community for years, simulating diseases in order to help the discovery of treatments. Starting from February 2020, the project began devoting resources to study the coronavirus for vulnerabilities with the hopes of developing a real-life cure vaccine.

Folding@home has been trying to develop a treatment for the pandemic by simulating how the coronavirus’s protein structure folds and unfolds at a microscopic level. Thanks to the increase in computing power, the research is more quickly than ever. “I can now run a protein, come back in a week and already know what the next step is, this would take a month to a few months before,” Rafal Wiewiora, a researcher with the project.

Adapted from: https://www.pcmag.com/news/in-fight-against-coronavirus-folding-at-home-...

More information: https://foldingathome.org/covid19/

https://youtu.be/Ybrl6b6A7Ls