As the highly infectious COVID-19 coronavirus continues its global spread, there has been a growing call from within the PC industry for extra computing power to help fight the disease.
One of the primary proponents is Folding@home, a lab that uses distributed computing to solve biomedical problems.
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It all started when the PC Master Race Twitter account shared a post from Nat Friedman, GitHub CEO, about how the open-source depository is donating its idle computing power Folding@home. Specifically, it will be providing up to 60,000 core-hours per day of idle GitHub Actions compute capacity, to be exact.
This tweet started the ball rolling as various IT industry leaders — like Intel and NVIDIA — quickly got onboard. They then encouraged their fans and the general public to contribute their idle processing power to the discovery of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Within weeks, most major PC manufacturers have joined the cause and have called on their fans to join too.
All Folding@home needs is any available computing capabilities from CPUs and GPUs that are not in use — every little bit counts. Having more processing power will help them run simulations faster. More importantly, as more users start sharing their unused processing power, the team can help prepare and setup additional simulations.
Those keen on contributing their PC’s idle processing can do so by downloading the Folding@home software. Once installed, it will start sending the unused computing power over to the simulation hubs.
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