Fighting COVID-19 Together
These are unprecedented times and we’re all doing our part to stop the spread of COVID-19 to protect ourselves, our families, and members of our communities. Like most, we are practicing social distancing and working completely remotely. Still, we recognize that we have a duty to our clients to help them do the same. Our work suddenly took on a new purpose – help our clients get their employees home as quickly as possible.
Over the past few weeks, we implemented new remote access solutions for many of our customers and helped others scale to handle the sudden need to work from home. As that rush subsided, like most, we settled into our new way of living and working. Some call this the “new normal”; we call it “for now” — we will return to the things and places we love most! With that in mind, we found ourselves asking how we could do more.
Servers for Good
We spent this past week repurposing all of our spare server capacity to help fight COVID-19 and develop therapeutic drugs with Folding@Home, a Stanford University developed project that uses computers from all over the world to run complex protein folding simulations.
The purpose of these simulations is to gather enough data to help scientists develop a breakthrough treatment. Much like purchasing a lottery ticket, each simulation has a chance of leading to discoveries that could aid researchers in further understanding the virus. In other words, enough of these complex math problems could help researchers find ways to treat or even prevent COVID-19.
As of today, all of our idle compute capacity is now being used to run protein folding simulations that we hope will help the scientific community advance their research. We have also shut down all of our testing, non-critical, and non-service delivering systems to make more capacity available for folding. While we represent just a tiny fraction of the computing power working to fight this disease, just like doing our part by staying home, we also know that each CPU cycle spent on folding can make a difference.
Join Us!
Don’t let us fold alone! Folding@Home is the world’s largest computing system. You too can donate your personal computer’s idle time to solving enormous calculations that may further a treatment or cure.
You can get started in just a few minutes. The software is small and the configuration is quick.
- Download and run the installer for Linux, Mac, or Windows.
- Choose any name to identify and track your contributions.
- Use the ProVista Technologies team number to contribute to our rankings and fight COVID-19 alongside us: 259404
That’s it! Open FAHControl and the software connects to Folding@Home servers to request a Work Unit (WU) — part of the protein folding math equation. Once it has a WU the software will solve that unit and upload the result. This process repeats, making you part of the largest super-computer in the world, working hard to fight this global pandemic.
Come back to this page to check on your progress below!
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