Join our Folding@Home team to help fight coronavirus

Any chance to help is worthwhile.

There are many things individuals can do to fight the new coronavirus. The most important is to follow policies such as social distancing that are designed to protect our healthcare systems and all those with and without COVID-19. We can also show charity and compassion to the millions devastated by the economic impact of these policies.

But there’s one more thing that should appeal to all the tech geeks in the STAC community: contribute to anti-viral research by donating time from our personal computers.

A group of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis recently created a Folding@Home project seeking to identify therapeutic antibody targets for the virus. If you're not familiar with Folding@Home, it is a citizen science initiative in which volunteers allow their systems to use spare cycles to compute portions of very large problems in molecular research on diseases. The response to the COVID-19 challenge has already been so great that the researchers temporarily ran out of problems to solve, but they seem to have since beefed up the pipeline. With enough compute, it seems like this might actually move the needle of progress.

Since we know the STAC community is full of people who like to improve the world and who have extra compute lying about their homes (sometimes lots of extra compute), we’re inviting you to join our Folding@Home team called “STAC Community”. Instructions are below.

Together we make amazing systems. Today, perhaps we can also make an amazing difference.

Thanks,

The STAC Team

---

Story Update - 3/26/20

Folding@Home has been overwhelmed by global support. This is a great problem for them to have and this level of support needs to continue. However, it means a couple of things for those contributing:

• There sometimes are not enough work units for everyone. If your computer is not processing a job, that is ok. Just let the service run and there will be work units to do eventually.
• There have been long delays in results appearing in the statistics. When you finish a work unit it will not show up immediately in individual or team stats. This is only a delay in reporting and the work you do is being contributed to the greater project immediately. Also note that you will not show up as a team member until your first work unit completion is processed by the stats system.

Keep folding and keep helping a great cause!

---

Click here for instructions and client downloads.

When using your client for the first time you’ll be prompted for the following:

• Username: <choose one>
• Passkey: <follow passkey instructions>
• Team Number: 249492

If you already have a Folding@Home account, just run the FAH Control program (or access Web Control.url on a Mac) and enter our team number in the configuration.

When running the program, set your research category to "Any".

Click here to follow our stats.

Click here to follow the leaderboard.

Let’s see if we can get into the Top 100!