Stanford teamed up with idle computers around the world to study the new coronavirus

the world's idle computers together! The Folding@home Distributed Computing Project, hosted by Stanford University's Pande Lab, has officially launched an invitation to the world to find volunteers to use computers idle in their homes to help researchers develop treatments for new coronavirus.founded on October 1, 2000,
Folding@home is a distributed computing project that studies protein folding, folding, polymerization and related diseases, and is currently the world's largest distributed computing program, having won the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007.
FAH said on its official website that 2019-nCoV is a "close relative" of SARS-CoV and works in a similar way. For both coronavirus, lung infection occurs when the protein on the surface of the virus binds to the protein of the subject on the lung cells. This viral protein is called prickly protein. Since proteins do not stagnate, oscillate, fold, and unfold in a variety of shapes, we need to study not only one shape of the viral hedgehog protein, but also all the ways in which the protein swings and folds into other shapes to better understand how it interacts with the ACE2 subject so that therapeutic antibodies can be developed. Understanding this information requires us to model the structure of the 2019-nCoV peak protein. We need to build a computational model that can do this, but it requires a lot of computing power.
FAH hopes to use volunteers' idle central processors to build computing power. To participate in the new coronavirus project, volunteers can download FAH software and send their computer resources to Folding@home to help the research team at memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center improve their understanding of the 2019-nCoV virus and design new treatments.
each participating computer has installed a client program running in the background, you can call the central processor to run the simulation when the system is not busy. Today, most of the world's personal computers rarely exhaust their computing power in general. Folding@home is to use these computing power that would otherwise have been wasted. Folding@Home clients that are scheduled to connect to a server at Stanford University to obtain "work units", a packet containing experimental data that is calculated based on experimental data. After each unit of work is calculated, it is passed back to the server.
It's worth noting that FAH used the idle Sony PlayStation 3s to help with the study, and the latter's unique "Core" processor provided better performance than comparable computers at the time when dealing with specific tasks that FAH was performing. But Sony removed the feature from the PS3 in 2012.
previous Folding@home studies have included Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, bovine spongiogenic encephalopathy (mad cow disease, mad cow disease), cancer and cystic fibrosis.