Over 400K people have joined Folding@home to combat Covid-19

Before the Folding@home project started working on Covid-19, the project has over 30K active folders, generating over 100 PetaFLOPS of computing performance. Now, the project has over 400K new users. 

Folding@home’s Greg Bowman has run the numbers and found that Folding@home now has access to 474 PetaFLOPS of computing power, representing an increase in network performance of over 4.7x. This highlights the desire to help tackle the global Covid-19 pandemic in whatever way they can.

This success for the Folding@home project comes thanks to the generosity of the PC gaming community, from the many hardware-focused websites who have written articles and started dedicated Folding teams to assist the project to the many gamers who have dedicated their PC’s performance to the cause. 

A special mention must also go to the PCMasterRace Subreddit, which has quickly become the world’s fastest team with over 26,000 active users. At the time or writing, OC3D’s Redline Folding Team is currently placed 64th in terms of daily point generation, but that is with only 104 active Folders. 

Right now, the Folding@home project has both CPU and GPU-based projects which are designed to simulate the properties of Covid-19’s proteins. This will allow researchers to analyse where drugs can potentially interact with the virus and discover new treatments methods that will help increase the survival chances of sufferers. 

Currently, the Folding@Home project is currently working on similar projects to assist research into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and more. This makes Folding@home a great project to support, even if your computer isn’t working on Covid-19/Coronavirus directly.