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Giving as a gesture of love and responsibility. What if we told you that it is possible to donate computing capacity to learn more about Covid-19? Yes, it is possible. With Folding@home, a project that uses distributed computing to study the origin of different diseases, including cancer, Ebola and Alzheimer’s but also phenomena such as protein folding, drug design and other types of molecular dynamics.

Folding@home uses the unused computing power of thousands of PCs owned by volunteers, who have decided to install and run special software on their computers. Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding , which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes that lead to protein misfolding.
Since February 2020, Folding@home has turned its attention to Covid-19 and more than 200,000 people around the world have donated their computing power to a cause as important as the pandemic.

It should be noted that this global collaboration is the first widely distributed computing resource. Technically, it is a supercomputer capable of doing a quintillion of calculations per second, which is generating datasets of unprecedented size, and which Folding@home is making available to researchers around the world through the “Open Data Registry on
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“Our simulations are essentially a huge number of images of what a protein looks like,” comments project director Greg Bowman . That’s why we need so much computing power, and it’s why we’re making data available in the AWS cloud. We need as many brains as possible to work on it in parallel, in order to reap the benefits.”

Thanks to the Cloud, it is possible to access information and download it quickly. Suffice it to say that Folding@home has produced more than 100,000 times more data on the Covid-19 virus than those typically created for other simulation studies and before Folding@home made this data available on the “AWS Open Data Registry”, accessing it was incredibly expensive and complex, given the size of the files. Often, this required sending physical hard drives to share a data set.
The program aims to democratize access to data by making it available for analysis on AWS, to develop new techniques that reduce the cost of working with data, and to encourage the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets.

“We are actively using this data for drug discovery ,” says Greg Bowman We have products in the testing phase and we hope to develop a new clinical trial in the next six months. We started this project to answer some basic research questions, and the answer so far has completely exceeded our expectations.”