If you’re stuck at home and wishing there was something you and your Mac could do to help with Coronavirus/COVID-19 research, or medical research in general, this might come in handy.
The amazingly cool cats at the Folding@Home project, a long-standing distributed computing project organized by Washington University and Stanford has created a client that allows Mac, Windows, and Unix users to contribute computing cycles to medical research. The cycles help researchers compute protein folding cycles that allow them to understand illnesses that are related to proteins and protein (mis)folding, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and COVID-19.
The Folding@Home project has now been going on for almost two decades, and its client is easy to download, install, and run in the background as you get other work done throughout the day.
As of now, COVID-19 units are being developed, and users can help researchers grind these out within a relatively short period of time. All work units that are received and processed still aid medical research, and are appreciated.
The Folding@Home client is free and requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later to install and run.
If you’ve had a chance to try this out and have any feedback to offer, please let us know about your experience in the comments.
Via Folding@Home