Hey folks - I know a lot of people, like myself, are sheltering in place these days, and wishing they could do more to help the situation. I do hope everyone is keeping safe, and is doing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances!
Along those lines, I wanted to point folks to a long-term project that has been being run in conjunction with Stanford University, NVIDIA, and others, known as Folding@Home. This project has been a 'crowd-sourcing' solution to allow folks to donate idle processor time on their computers towards aiding with biological and medical research - and, these days, that includes a lot of rapid COVID-19 research. As I said, this is a long running and very reputable project - so putting their client on your computer is as 'low risk' as I think you can expect of anything - they are known 'good agents'!
In any case, their clients (for Windows, Mac, Linux, and others) can be found here - https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/ - and are trivial to install. You can also register as a 'donor' and have your statistics captured (https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/66807938 is mine). The client runs minimum priority, and can be set to be even more 'invisible' as you decide (e.g. only do work while the system is not being used, don't run while you are on battery), so there are little to no worries about it interfering with the normal use of your system,
Along those lines, you can also specify a team to accumulate your 'credit' with - and this is where the 'WesterosCraft' team I created comes in. If you add team ID 255971 when you configure your client, your points will also be combined with any of the rest of us that are doing the same (here's the stats URL for our team - https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/255971
This project is currently, in aggregate, 5 times the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer, so this is a very real resource for the folks trying to solve COVID and other medical and biological challenges, so I'd very much encourage folks - particularly folks like many of us who have high performance gaming PCs that spend most of their time just making the air in your house warm - to consider joining our team and donating some of that idle capacity to this effort.
For some more information on this effort. check out: https://news.developer.nvidia.com/foldinghome-gpu-accelerated-exaflop/
Along those lines, I wanted to point folks to a long-term project that has been being run in conjunction with Stanford University, NVIDIA, and others, known as Folding@Home. This project has been a 'crowd-sourcing' solution to allow folks to donate idle processor time on their computers towards aiding with biological and medical research - and, these days, that includes a lot of rapid COVID-19 research. As I said, this is a long running and very reputable project - so putting their client on your computer is as 'low risk' as I think you can expect of anything - they are known 'good agents'!
In any case, their clients (for Windows, Mac, Linux, and others) can be found here - https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/ - and are trivial to install. You can also register as a 'donor' and have your statistics captured (https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/66807938 is mine). The client runs minimum priority, and can be set to be even more 'invisible' as you decide (e.g. only do work while the system is not being used, don't run while you are on battery), so there are little to no worries about it interfering with the normal use of your system,
Along those lines, you can also specify a team to accumulate your 'credit' with - and this is where the 'WesterosCraft' team I created comes in. If you add team ID 255971 when you configure your client, your points will also be combined with any of the rest of us that are doing the same (here's the stats URL for our team - https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/255971
This project is currently, in aggregate, 5 times the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer, so this is a very real resource for the folks trying to solve COVID and other medical and biological challenges, so I'd very much encourage folks - particularly folks like many of us who have high performance gaming PCs that spend most of their time just making the air in your house warm - to consider joining our team and donating some of that idle capacity to this effort.
For some more information on this effort. check out: https://news.developer.nvidia.com/foldinghome-gpu-accelerated-exaflop/
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