Fight Coronavirus using spare computing power

Rosetta@Home calculating...


There are a couple of options to make your PC join the fight against Coronavirus:

1. Folding@Home has seen the most news coverage so far. Maybe you've heard about it. You can easily start by downloading the Folding@Home client.

2. Rosetta@Home is another project that is calculating possible cures to the disease. This one seems to have gotten much less media attention. You can start here.

Both of these projects have been around a long time before the Coronavirus, researching cures for a list of other diseases like HIV, Ebola, Zika, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, etc.

Folding@Home has maybe the easier user interface. For non-technical users it might be the better choice.

Rosetta@Home uses BOINC, which has more features and allows you to specifically define the conditions for using your computing power. For the more technical ones I recommend Rosetta.

You can also earn a little pocket money from calculating Rosetta@Home tasks. A cryptocurrency called Gridcoin is built around the idea of rewarding scientific calculations. This approach avoids wasting computing power to made-up tasks, like calculating hashes in Bitcoin.

The easiest way for a beginner to start with Gridcoin would be to install the Gridcoin wallet and join the Gridcoin pool at grcpool.com. They have released some easy-to-follow videos for beginners.  However, the value of Gridcoin has plummeted and you shouldn't expect this to be profitable at all. Still, in my opinion this is a better idea than to warm up the world by calculating Bitcoin hashes.

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