There is now a call from nvidia geforce who make gpu's for them to use some gpu power of your pc for research to aid the progress of a cure for covid 19. The people who are running this program is called folding@home. what it does is it takes some processing power from your pc and puts it towards the problem you get assigned. all of this is while your machine is powered on. here is there twitter link to the twitter from nvidia https://twitter.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1238496311776653312 and here is the steps needed to get started! https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/fhb5e4/coronavirus_specific_gpu_projects_are_now/ Even if your machine is not powerful like mine then please do it!! it might not be as fast as other machines but it is better than nothing
For those of you who to whom what is written above seems non-English (like me) Nvidea, a technology company primarily known for making GPUs, is asking people to help with research on Covid-19. For micro biology research a lot of computing power is needed, which most research institutions simply cannot afford. Therefore, Folding@Home has set up a program that allows people to lend their computing power to research facilities so that they can use the computing power of your pc for their research, creating a supercomputer with tremendous computation power by linking all the computers together. This page has existed for quite a while, and you can also help with research on Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, for example. US research for Covid-19 uses this exact page to get results as quickly as possible. People have noticed this, and are now asking everyone to join in, Nvidea is one of those. By joining folding@home yourself, you can also do a small part in this computation power needy task. It will run in the background, not using up a noticeable amount of computing power when all you’re doing is browsing the web or doing stuff on word. If your PC gets loud under load, it probably will do that now too, as this program locks both your GPU and CPU usage at around 80%. Additionally, you are not going to be able to do this whilst gaming, or doing any other task your computer normally struggles with. Depending on your computer and the amount of time it’s on idle, your power bill might go as far as 50 euros up every month you have this program running in the background, so do not do this if you or your parents have monetary problems. If you are using a computer without an allocated graphics card, your contribution is probably going to be insignificant, so don’t do it then when it’s even the slightest of an incontinence. I, for example, have a Gforce 960, a ~100 euro card on which you can only play AAA games from 2015 and before. This card is roughly 100 times more effective than a setup without an allocated graphics card. The most expensive card on the market is only 13 times more effective than mine. Having an allocated card basically is the important part. You can find a chart of effectiveness here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vcVoSVtamcoGj5sFfvKF_XlvuviWWveJIg_iZ8U2bf0/pub?output=html# but, as a rule of thumb: if you cannot play minecraft with shaders, don’t bother. Instead, you can better donate the money you would otherwise be spending on electricity to research directly, as that would be a more effective use of that money. If you have a pc that is not a potato, and have it turned on whilst idle relatively often, where you wouldn’t be bothered by it being a bit louder than usual, or it using quite a lot of power, folding@home is a good way to help with charitable work in general. You can help with research of various deceases, one of which is Covid-19. All the information you might need on how to run this program and how to download it can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterra...inghome_and_pcmr_team_up_use_your_pc_to_help/ The reddit thread on the Covid-19 research of folding@home: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/fhb5e4/coronavirus_specific_gpu_projects_are_now/ For those wondering, the name folding@home refers to what your pc is actually testing: It is calculating through various ways in which a protein can be folded. I know that sounds boring and unimportant, but it is the one large bottlenecks of microbiology research, as there is no simple way to do it. It has to be brute-forced, and therefore a lot of cumputing power is needed. That is becasue it is not nvidea itself. They simply teweeted about it, as they know their followers usually are the kinds of people with the types of computer that can make a significant difference. It's a small marketing stunt by them, nothing worthy to note on their website. Instead, I would advice you to go to one of the reddit thread I linked or the website of folding@home for information about the project.
