Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home

By Liam Dawe - 21 Mar 2020 at 11:08 am UTC

Last updated: 22 Mar 2020 at 9:24 am UTC

Alright Coronavirus, this has gone on long enough. It's time to kick your arse. Want to help? We've made a team on Folding@home for you to spare your unused CPU/GPU cycles for research.

Hold on, what is this Folding stuff? It's a distributed computing project that simulates protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It does this using your hardware and then sends all the data back to them—for science! It can help people working on diseases to better understand them. A good time to remind people on this, with everything going on right now and they have special simulations setup for Coronavirus.

Image Credit

How to get involved: Head to the official site to download it for Debian /Ubuntu/ Mint and Redhat / Centos / Fedora. If you're on Arch/Manjaro, you can see a guide on the Arch Wiki. If you're on NVIDIA, and it won't use your GPU, ensure you have OpenCL installed.

When you're setting it up and it asks you for a team ID, enter "245680" (stats page) which is the GamingOnLinux ID and we can work together to make a better world. Right now, my GPU is purring away working on Folding, come and join me.

You might see errors and delays, as they've been a little overwhelmed. Eventually though, it should assign your PC some work to do to help. They did a little FAQ thread recently on Twitter.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Misc

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
See more from me

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101 comments

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Valck 9 Sep 2020

I wonder how many of that Linux power comes from mainframes or supercomputers lent to that project.

My gut feeling says: about ninety-nine-point-something percent

If you look at only the number of CPU cores, the ratio of Mac vs. Windows is on the order of ten percent.
Now assuming the market shares that are getting reported over and over again are somewhere close to the truth, we'd have to put the Linux share at some fraction of the Mac. According to the figures you posted, it is about a thousand times higher than what would be expected from that.
I'd say it's safe to say that most of it is due to supercomputers that do not appear in the market statistics of Steam or whoever else publishes OS shares...

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