PC gamers and researchers asked to donate GPU and CPU time to help fight coronavirus

The deadly virus has already killed more over 6,300 people worldwide

A distributed computing project is urging researchers and PC gamers worldwide to donate some of their CPU and GPU computing power to help in the fight against coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.

Folding@home (FAH) is an international project based in the Pande Lab at Stanford University. Led by Dr Greg Bowman, the project utilises the idle computing power of hundreds of thousands of PCs owned by volunteers across the world to simulate the molecular dynamics of protein folding and misfolding in various diseases.

According to FAH, those simulations will help scientists in discovering new drug opportunities against diseases.

Please be patient with us! There is a lot of valuable science to be done

The FAH team is currently aiming to investigate how specific proteins in the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) operate and how those proteins can be destroyed to prevent the virus from multiplying within the human body.

Last month, the FAH team announced that it was taking up the fight again coronavirus, with the aim to help develop a therapeutic antibody, similar to that previously developed for SARS-Cov in 2003.

"To help tackle coronavirus, we want to understand how these viral proteins work and how we can design therapeutics to stop them," FAH said.

The deadly coronavirus has already killed more over 6,300 people worldwide, while hundreds of thousands still remain infected with the virus. Governments across the world are responding to coronavirus outbreak by curbing the movements of citizens and tightening borders.

FAH has so far added 23 coronavirus projects to use donated GPU or CPU power to study the coronavirus.

Contributing to the FAH project is easy, as users just need to download and install the client for their operating system from the FAH website. Once installed, the client will be configured to 'lightly' use system's GPU and CPU processing power to perform protein simulations.

Users can also use 'Medium' or 'Full' options to increase the amount of CPU and GPU utilisation.

"Usually, your computer will never be idle, but we've had such an enthusiastic response to our COVID-19 work that you will see some intermittent downtime as we sprint to setup more simulations," FIH said.

"Please be patient with us! There is a lot of valuable science to be done, and we're getting it running as quickly as we can."