Recently, I built a computer. While the main reasons to build this were for school video calls and a couple of video games, I have found that this computer, and many others, could be used to do so much more.

Folding@home, or F@h, is an application that can be downloaded to a computer and has been around for about 20 years. Founded by Stanford, this app then runs simulated protein dynamics either at all times or when the computer goes idle. F@h explains it more in-depth in their about page on their website:

“Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.”

This is how it works: the computer takes all of the unused computing power from the PC to run those simulations. Each of these simulations has a project name and descriptions of what is happening and computing. According to the current stats page, F@h estimates their total computing performance to be about 2.6 million TFLOPS (floating point operations per second). This number is gigantic compared to the computing ability of some of the largest and most powerful supercomputers on the planet.

Currently, most folding projects are being focused on the research for COVID-19, but F@h can be used for many other diseases such as the Zika Virus, Ebola Virus and Hepatitis C. F@h can also be used to help with research on cancers such as Breast Cancer and Kidney Cancers, and Neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.

If you are reading and have an idle computer at home, I urge you to go to foldingathome.org and start folding. With your help we can cure both COVID-19 and many other diseases even after life goes back to normal.