Covid-19India.org Folding@Home team

Covid19India.org

Quick Introduction

Folding

'Folding' refers to how human proteins fold in human cells. Proteins usually assemble themselves by folding. 'Misfolds' can cause diseases. Folding@home was initially designed to distribute the problem of simulating these sort of protein structures and their folding to multiple computers all over the world. These are computationally intensive problems, so distributed computing is leveraged to solve them. A larger number of processors would mean a shorter time to obtain a solution.

At the moment, they have models like those that simulate the interaction of the 'spike' protein of the Coronavirus with human cells. In vague terms, if a drug is found that can block these 'spikes' from contacting human cells, you can essentially make a person immune to the disease

How does the F@H client work?

The client runs in the background on our system and starts automatically right after installation. At any time, the client can be monitored by the web interface via the link http://client.foldingathome.org .

The client works by downloading work units (WUs) from the Stanford University servers. These are parts of simulation problems that are solved by running on your CPUs or GPUs. It may take a few minutes (to hours) to have a WU allotted to your system. Restarting your system or just waiting for a while often resolves simple issues.

Once a WU is downloaded, the client runs the problem on your processors in the background. The client will only use whatever processing power is left over to fold with and does not affect other programs. During this process, an internet connection is not necessary. Once the WU completes running, the client uploads the completed work back to the servers when a connection is available.

How do I contribute and what project am I contributing to?

All you need to do is download the client and let it run in the background. You can set processing power to Low, Medium or High as necessary in the web interface. This adjusts the cores available for the client to use.

It is not possible to force the F@H client to only support a specific problem. For the recent Coronavirus efforts, the default 'I support research fighting: Any disease' setting is the best bet. You can however know the specific project you are contributing to by looking at the Project Number and description in 'read more...' at the bottom right corner in the web interface.