You may have heard of Folding @ home, a popular application that can be run on a computer to help researchers cope with some medical problems, including the new coronavirus.
Last month, the network of volunteers who installed it has grown so vast that the platform surpasses the world's most powerful supercomputers.
According to Folding @ home director and biochemist Greg Bowman, nearly 700,000 new Folding @ home operators have joined in recent weeks. This is a huge increase from the 30,000 people who routinely use Folding @ home all the time.
And it also makes a huge difference to computing power – the Folding @ home network reached an astounding 2.4 exaflops of computing power earlier this week, making it faster than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined.
The main task of Folding @ home is to model how proteins behave in the body, which underlies many basic biological functions.
These functions include viral infection: the Folding @ home team is studying, in particular, how the so-called 'spike' of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which is actually made up of three proteins) attaches to human cells and infects the human body.
This is a key way for the novel coronavirus to enter human tissue, so blocking it could be critical for future treatments and vaccinations. If we can understand how spike proteins work – what Folding @ home's computer simulations do – then we can better design drugs to stop them.
The spike of the SARS-CoV-2 protein in action. (Folding @ home / YouTube)
“If you tried to simulate such a process on your home computer, you would be lucky enough to see even part of the process over the next 100 years,” writes Bowman on the Folding @ home blog. 'Fortunately, we have reinforcements!'
The magic of Folding @ home is that it breaks down complex computer simulations of protein behavior into smaller tasks that can then be distributed across thousands of computers around the world – each taking a piece.
Folding @ home is also carrying out many other projects related to the coronavirus: it is processing data to evaluate the effectiveness of potential drugs that are now being tested in laboratories and to analyze how the coronavirus controls the cell mechanism after infection.
