https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/foldinghome-supercomputer-network-covid-19-cure

The race to find a coronavirus vaccine is on, with about 35 companies and academic institutions across the world working feverishly on the case. But Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is a novel, as well as a large and complex structure. The process of discovering a vaccine is complemented and accelerated by building a solid ground layer in knowledge about the virus. One of the projects helping to plug the gaps in our understanding is Folding@home, based at Stanford University. It’s a distributed computing project that links up the machines of ‘citizen scientists’ across the world willing to donate excess computing resources from their devices to help run simulations of disease proteins at scale.  

For the past 20 years, the project has been mapping disease proteins involved in Alzheimers and cancer, but in late February it began modelling the protein structures of Covid-19 too. This decision prompted the project’s biggest ever spike in new volunteers signing up via downloadable software – around 600,000 so far, putting it on track to reach one million total users. The network is now operating at an ‘exaflop’ of computing power: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a billion billion) operations per second.