Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus

Viral Research Firm? I thought F@H was run out of Stanford University.<p>Edit: it&#x27;s run out of Washington University (St. Louis School of Medicine) so it&#x27;s definitely neither a firm nor viral. Mods should change the title.

There was a recent HN discussion on whether this kind of approach has ever produced an effective treatment for anything. I believe the answer was <i>Never, but lots of papers have been published</i>.<p>Assuming that&#x27;s the case, I don&#x27;t put much stock in this giving us a means of fighting the pandemic.

I wish they would spend five minutes documenting how to use the GPU on Ubuntu. My 1080ti is just sitting idle while my CPU is busy folding. Any instructions I came across said something like “make sure you have the libraries” but then failed to describe even at a high level how to locate and install those libraries. Last time I installed any CUDA libraries it involved adding an Nvidia repo or something.<p>Edit: I’d be glad to be proven wrong with a link to an FAQ or some part of the docs.

Title nit-pick -- It isn&#x27;t a &quot;firm&quot;, but a project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Folding@home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Folding@home</a>

Make sure to contribute GPU resources as the CPU ones aren&#x27;t being used for C19 research.<p>EDIT: I have heard that CPU is also getting C19 research but not exclusively.<p>Here is a better link with more details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FoldingAtHome&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FoldingAtHome&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;REA...</a><p>FreeBSD port: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leidinger.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;19&#x2F;fighting-the-coronavirus-with-freebsd-foldinghome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leidinger.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;19&#x2F;fighting-the-coron...</a><p>NixOS port: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.nixos.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;fight-covid-19-with-folding-home-and-nixos&#x2F;6202" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.nixos.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;fight-covid-19-with-folding-ho...</a>

So is someone sitting there, monitoring the results of this C19 folding operation as they come in and then when they see exactly the right result they shout eureka! and dance around the room? Then they shout &quot;Get this to the lab, stat!&quot; After which the lab starts churning out thousands of vials of antidote and everyone gets cured?

My gas furnace supplies a baseline of heat, and my basement gets topped up with electric heat. What are the mechanics of energy usage for me?<p>I feel like all energy is converted to heat in my laptop. That would mean free computing power?<p>Am I missing something? Can energy be converted to a form I am overlooking with computational work?

Responded cheekily with this link in a reply chain but wanted to bubble it up... you can earn a form of cryptocurrency from folding work units: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;curecoin.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;curecoin.net&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t mind donating to them, but what are the kinds of problems has folding at home has solved in recent times (~5 years)?

Would be cool if i could join on my PS4... guess I&#x27;d need to jailbreak it and run Linux.

its really compute power lol. i am folding with my V100 gpus.

Does this project have enough promise compared to its external cost? I imagine that’s <i>a lot</i> of energy usage.