Your processors and graphics cards can help you look for a coronavirus vaccine, here's how

If you would like to contribute to research that might help detect COVID-19 virus vaccine, you can do so with your computer.

We have already written that by solving puzzles in one game, you can contribute to the study of the COVID-19 virus and therefore to the search for a vaccine against it. However, if this game is too complicated for you and you would rather contribute to it otherwise, it may be possible to use a processor and / or graphics card on your computer.

Similar to how you can mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin with your computer, you can use the Folding @ home application to borrow the computing power of your components so that researchers can more easily perform the various simulations necessary for virus research and do complex calculations to generate potential antibodies.

The Folding @ home project has been around for many years, was launched at Stanford University, and other diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. are being studied. Last weekend, the project was supported by well-known hardware manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other.

How to participate in this?
You can contribute to the research with the processor and graphics card of your PC (with Windows operating systems). As a general rule, the stronger / faster / more capable these components are, the greater your contribution will be. It should be emphasized that you can determine how much computing power you want to "donate" for this purpose and when.

The first thing you need to do is download the Folding @ home program yourself from this site. You then install it on your computer, which I advise you to select the expert option during installation so that you can decide when the program starts, otherwise it may run without your knowledge when you turn on your computer.

After installation, run the program and you will be greeted by an interface that looks like this:

There are three settings for the amount of CPU and GPU resources you "lend" to research: light, medium, and full. Depending on these settings, your processor and / or graphics will run at a certain pace, but it should be emphasized that the "full" setting significantly loads your hardware, so be sure you have adequate cooling and be aware that components will consume more power during this process. .

If you do not want the program to burden your computer while you are working on it, you can choose to have this process performed while the computer is idle, or when you do nothing else with it.

You must leave "Any disease" to help coronavirus research, and you will know when you contribute to the name of the project on the right. To track exactly how much you contribute to the research, you need to select your username, and you'll see the number of "points" earned. You can also join a specific group and add your total points to the group.


Finally, it should be stressed that due to the onset of interest, the project may sometimes not work properly, but in case you do not immediately register all of the above, try several times and once you will be sure to register to participate in the coronavirus research project.