The Folding at Home project has been around for two decades and is still going strong. For the uninitiated, the project conducts disease research by carving out units of work that can be shipped to an individual"s computer so that those machines can conduct protein folding simulations. When your computer is done crunching the numbers, it sends the results back to the Folding at Home servers and requests another unit of work.
The group has recently started assisting scientists in finding a cure for the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19. What this means is that your spare CPU cycles can be donated to the project to help find a cure to the pandemic that"s impacting everyone"s lives around the world. The project is aiming to recruit a million volunteers.
Helping out is easy: Simply download the program from their website, type in what name you want to use and optionally what team you want to join, and let it go. You can configure how much machine power you want to donate, and you can even click on the Configure button to setup how many CPU cores you want to provide. As a warning, if you let it consume your entire machine, it will definitely peg the CPU at 100% and generate quite a bit of heat. My workstation is powered by the Ryzen 3900x, and after initially giving the tool access to all 24 cores, I noticed the CPU temperature was extremely hot, so I limited it to only 12 of the cores, which is still plenty. The tool can also use your PC"s GPU for even more processing, and that"s currently the method used for the COVID-19 tests. You can search any of the projects to find out who is using the research and what it"s for on the Folding at Home website.
Neowin has had our own team since 2007, so when doing the install, it"d be great if you used our team number: 55186. The front-end servers are getting hammered recently with thousands of people rushing to sign up and help fight the disease, so you"ll often receive a "Bad Gateway" error when checking, but when things are working, you can check the status directly on the Folding at Home page by typing your name or team number into the search box.