So….we’re all still languishing inside! I hope you’re all healthy, happy (as you can be) and haven’t suffered personally from this continuing lockdown in Spain.
Over the past couple of months we’ve seen a rise in Internet based activity, from Zoom meetings with family to play quizzes or just chat to ‘remote’ yoga and Zumba, cycling online and all other types of activity that we didn’t think we would be doing just a few short weeks ago!
I was made aware, by my friend Tom, of a new way in which we can help the scientists and vaccine developers from the comfort of our computers – [email protected]
You may remember a decade or so back there was a quite successful screensaver called SETI@home. That enabled you help the “Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence” organisation scan small slices of the nights sky, whilst your computer was not being used by you, helping them process the massive amount of data needed in order to do the job. That process is called “distributed computing” and rather than using very expensive and extremely powerful super computers to do the processing required to do the job, it uses tens of thousands of ordinary computers while they are not being used by you and I.
Well now there is a new task in hand and that is to the harness the power of our computers to help run test simulations to help scientists understand how the viral proteins work in the Coronavirus in order to help develop a working vaccine.
It’s easy to get involved and help, all you have to do is visit https://foldingathome.org covid19 and click on the link to download Folding@home. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you will be given a few easy to understand options about how to run it. I recommend running it only when your computer is idle and maybe set it to medium power (that’s how much processing power it will use when its working) – if you decide to run it all the time then it could have an effect on the performance of your computer.
You can, if you wish, affiliate yourself with a team of people involved, the number of the team that I chose is 182116 – Sceptics and Humanists – feel free to join me!