In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nvidia, a tech company that designs graphics processing units (GPU) for gaming and professional uses, is also doing its part in combatting the outbreak. Nvidia urged gamers from all over the world to support Folding@home, a project that conducts research on diseases and is run by Standford University’s Pande Lab.
(FAH) is dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases that result from protein misfolding and aggregation, and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general.
The lab is led by Professor Vijay Pande, PhD and FAH’s main goal is to understand protein folding, misfolding and the diseases that can occur when proteins do not fold properly. When proteins do not fold correctly it results in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and BSE (mad cow diseases) among several others. Protein molecules fold in order to perform their biological function and this happens within a few microseconds or milliseconds. Ultimately, FAH runs on distributed computing which consists of many computers that runs as a single network.
The more people that participate to aid FAH, more power will be available in order to take on massive tasks and calculations related to their research. In order to help, all that is needed is for you to download their application which is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and let it run in the background and you can turn it off when necessary. If you are not gaming, you can put your GPU to good use in supporting the battle against COVID-19.
Currently, according to our health ministry, there are 162,711 COVID-19 cases worldwide and Malaysia has a total of 428 cases as of 8am today.
[SOURCE , IMAGE SOURCE]
