Donate your computing power to foldingathome COVID19
Donate your computing power to foldingathome COVID19
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anonymous-user

Original Poster:

84 months

Wednesday 1st April 2020
quotequote all
If you have a computer and want to make a small contribution to the COVID 19 fight, you might consider www.foldingathome.org/covid19

1. Donate computing power:

Downloading Folding@home and helping us run simulations is the primary way to contribute. These calculations are enormous and every little bit helps! Each simulation you run is like buying a lottery ticket. The more tickets we buy, the better our chances of hitting the jackpot.

softtop

3,172 posts

277 months

Wednesday 1st April 2020
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Once the people that know what they are talking about come on and endorse, others may choose to hold off until then.

Edited by softtop on Wednesday 1st April 19:25

indigochim

2,087 posts

160 months

Wednesday 1st April 2020
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Sounds legit despite the date of posting.

It's the same as the old SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Inelegance) at home used to be. Basically some boffins have a bunch of numbers to crunch and they're using spare compute power on other people devices to process their calculations like a distributed super computer. It doesn't look to be a new thing as they're using it to research for other conditions too.

I assume this will run in the background on your device and fill out the gaps where your computer is running idle so it shouldn't slow you down. It would likely increase the power consumption of your device.

sjg

7,683 posts

295 months

Wednesday 1st April 2020
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Folding at Home has been around for yonks - it used to be for calculating protein folding, hence the name. Basically crowd-sourced supercomputing for all kinds of biology problems - simulations get chopped up into smaller work units that get handed out to computers running the software, they do their little chunk and send the results back that then all gets stitched back together.

Type R Tom

4,334 posts

179 months

Wednesday 1st April 2020
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As I understand it, works better on graphics cards than CPUs as they are better and this type of calculation. I ran it for a while, was getting about 80-90% load on both and a little warm. I would be interested to see the power draw.

HM-2

12,467 posts

199 months

Thursday 2nd April 2020
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Type R Tom said:
As I understand it, works better on graphics cards than CPUs as they are better and this type of calculation.
Much, much better.

Including bonuses I'm averaging about 7,500 points per WU for CPU work units (that's an 8 core, 16 threat Intel i7-6900K overclocked to 4.2GHz) and circa 200,000 point per WU on an overclocked RTX2080.

devnull

3,870 posts

187 months

Thursday 2nd April 2020
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Yep, i contribute to this, I normally let my gaming machine run for a few WUs each day. Helps with heating the house too!!

plasticpig

12,932 posts

255 months

Thursday 2nd April 2020
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If you want to be more interactive in your assistance then I can highly recommend Fold it; you may even get your puzzle solution manufactured and tested: https://fold.it/portal/node/2009216


anonymous-user

Original Poster:

84 months

Wednesday 29th April 2020
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Dixons Carphone has issued a covid 19 trading update to the stockmarket today

https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/uk/dixons_c...

The last line of this section from it brought me back to this thread


anonymous-user

Original Poster:

84 months

Saturday 2nd May 2020
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Donate your phone’s spare processing too

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile/dreamlab

We’ve teamed up with Imperial College London to launch the new Corona-AI project, which harnesses the power of a connected UK and DreamLab technology to help in the fight against COVID-19. DreamLab harnesses your smartphone’s unused processing power to analyse complex data while you sleep, helping scientists identify existing drugs and food-based molecules that could benefit COVID-19 patients. Alongside thousands of other DreamLab users, you’ll help research better ways to fight COVID-19.