GPU Crypto Miners Marshaled To Assist In Coronavirus Research

Folding@home is on a novel path of saving the world from the scourge of COVID-19, a disease that has claimed over 10,000 deaths in the last three months. The crypto mining community has responded to their calls.

In their observations, the number of volunteer folders has skyrocketed. They are now decoding the virus as they work round the clock to develop a therapy and vaccine enabled by one of the largest crowdsourced super-computing projects in the world.

Decoding Coronavirus Protein Model

According to the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis Assistant Professor and the founder of Folding@home, Greg Bowman, PhD, this crowd enabled supercomputer powered by computing power contributed by the crypto mining community “delves into the protein structure of the virus”, analyzing it and helps the team identify vaccine (s) to combat the illness.

The team is specifically interested in understanding the “spike” protein, which causes the disease to spread.

Crypto Miners are Handy Tools useful in COVID-19 Research

The mining community funnels their extra computing power while still mining profitably and assist the research team “perform the complex calculations required to simulate the dynamics of the proteins Bowman and his colleagues are studying.”

Some PoW blockchains like Ethereum are powered by gear packed with GPUs. However, these GPUs can be used for other purposes other than mining unlike ASICs that solve one function only. That is, they are specifically designed to calculate and solve complex math keeping transactions encrypted.

“There are some traditional super-computing folks who might take issue with that characterization. Rather than a single massive machine, Folding@home is a distributed computing network.”

“Thousands of volunteers all over the world download our software and contribute a portion of their home computer setups to the project. But in terms of raw computing power — the sheer number of calculations it can perform per second — it’s on par with the world’s biggest supercomputers.”

Coronavirus Losses

Across the globe, there is a cause for concern.

Not only is the disease disrupting supply chain from China, but people stand to lose their jobs as governments, to prevent further contagion, are announcing crippling lock-downs.

The airline industry is the worst hit and there are plans by the US government and Treasury to bail them out with taxpayers.