Folding@Home with the Droid Builders

I think everyone in the world has been impacted in some way by the current pandemic, and a lot of people want to know what they can do to help.

This is where Folding@Home comes in. This project has been around for a long time, originally being released in 2000. It allows researchers to submit processor intensive work to the project, which is then pushed out to anyone who has the F@H client installed on their computer. This will then use any spare CPU/GPU time when your computer is idle to process this work.

Currently, due to the surge of interest from the pandemic, there is approximately 2.5 exaFLOPS of processing power. Which makes it more powerful than the top 9 supercomputers combined.

They also have the option to combine your effort into a team for a bit of friendly competition. To this end, I created the R2 Builders team and advertised it in a few groups.

Plenty of people jumped in to help, joining the team to consolidate their work. At the time of writing this article, we are actually at a position of 1202 out of 253258 teams. Quite an achievement.

Now not all this is COVID-19 research, the work units you get are from various projects, tho the Coronavirus units are prioritised. Even so, this is still going to be a big help to the research on the virus.

To say thanks to all the builders who have taken part in this team, I have had our resident artist design a patch which is currently in production. Anyone in the team at the time I ordered the patches will receive one for free, with extras available for purchase. Check the merch store when they are ready.

If you want to join in the fight, you can go to the Folding@Home site and download the client for your computer. Give yourself a username, and enter 242731 as the team ID.