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Alright Coronavirus, this has gone on long enough. It's time to kick your arse. Want to help? We've made a team on Folding@home for you to spare your unused CPU/GPU cycles for research.

Hold on, what is this Folding stuff? It's a distributed computing project that simulates protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It does this using your hardware and then sends all the data back to them—for science! It can help people working on diseases to better understand them. A good time to remind people on this, with everything going on right now and they have special simulations setup for Coronavirus.


Image Credit

How to get involved: Head to the official site to download it for Debian /Ubuntu/ Mint and Redhat / Centos / Fedora. If you're on Arch/Manjaro, you can see a guide on the Arch Wiki. If you're on NVIDIA, and it won't use your GPU, ensure you have OpenCL installed.

When you're setting it up and it asks you for a team ID, enter "245680" (stats page) which is the GamingOnLinux ID and we can work together to make a better world. Right now, my GPU is purring away working on Folding, come and join me.

You might see errors and delays, as they've been a little overwhelmed. Eventually though, it should assign your PC some work to do to help. They did a little FAQ thread recently on Twitter.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc
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101 comments
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Salvatos Mar 22, 2020
Quoting: Spud13yIn the settings you can set it up to contribute to other projects (like cancer and Alzheimer's). I don't see such an option for covid-19/coronavirus. Can I assume the default is sufficient as long as I'm part of the GoL group?
"Any" includes COVID-19 work units, and those are currently handed out with the highest priority, so if you want to focus on that, "Any" is the way to go for now. I believe they want to add a specific category in the next client release, but that could be a whiel

The team you’re in is irrelevant, it’s just a vanity thing that tracks points.
Salvatos Mar 22, 2020
Quoting: dudeThere's also a game to help discover an antiviral, programmed by the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design in Seattle: fold.it
I must be missing something obvious, but how do you run the executable?
Kuduzkehpan Mar 22, 2020
finally setup everyting and contributing to human future.
both gpu and cpu burning like a hell XD.
many linux based teams are in top 100 list with this cause
i hope darkest of the days will past away soon.
Liam Dawe Mar 22, 2020
Our team now actually shows up. We're ranked currently 12,516 of 238,810.
scaine Mar 22, 2020
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
Quoting: Liam DaweOur team now actually shows up. We're ranked currently 12,516 of 238,810.

I left my GPU running last night, only to wake up this morning to a jump from 600 points (two jobs on my CPU) to 137k!!

The team is now visible with detailed stats too: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

My GPU runs at 82 degrees when it's folding - roughly the equivalent of playing a AAA game. But the loads it takes are worth much, much more than the loads my CPU is assigned. Very impressive!
pal666 Mar 22, 2020
it should come with fedora. really it should be integrated into boinc which comes with fedora. and it should support drivers which come with fedora. right now they aren't that much interested in my donation
Boldos Mar 22, 2020
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  • Supporter
Hmmmm...
My Folding client seems to support calculataion of Cancer, Alzhheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, but no COVID-19...?

FYI: I'm using web control UI; not using fahcontrol => I failed installing it on Ubuntu 18.04, 19.04, 19.10 and 20.04beta, and after trying all possible solutions (none of them worked) I just gave up trying for now....
tuubi Mar 22, 2020
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  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: BoldosHmmmm...
My Folding client seems to support calculataion of Cancer, Alzhheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, but no COVID-19...?

FYI: I'm using web control UI; not using fahcontrol => I failed installing it on Ubuntu 18.04, 19.04, 19.10 and 20.04beta, and after trying all possible solutions (none of them worked) I just gave up trying for now....
This was answered above:
Quoting: Salvatos"Any" includes COVID-19 work units, and those are currently handed out with the highest priority, so if you want to focus on that, "Any" is the way to go for now. I believe they want to add a specific category in the next client release, but that could be a whiel
Boldos Mar 22, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: BoldosHmmmm...
My Folding client seems to support calculataion of Cancer, Alzhheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, but no COVID-19...?

FYI: I'm using web control UI; not using fahcontrol => I failed installing it on Ubuntu 18.04, 19.04, 19.10 and 20.04beta, and after trying all possible solutions (none of them worked) I just gave up trying for now....
This was answered above:
Quoting: Salvatos"Any" includes COVID-19 work units, and those are currently handed out with the highest priority, so if you want to focus on that, "Any" is the way to go for now. I believe they want to add a specific category in the next client release, but that could be a whiel
Oh, I missed that one. Thanks for clarification :)
thewho Mar 22, 2020
You can also get some crypto-money while mining: https://www.publish0x.com/banano/heres-how-you-can-help-fight-coronavirus-and-youll-even-get-xmvdpq

Greets from the Banano community :)
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