Call To Action
Frequently, when presented with an overwhelming problem, we humans try to find our own ways to help. It’s in our nature. We may not be able to digest something in its entirety, but we can use our own talents to offer assistance where we can. On March 30th last year, PC Matic asked that of you.
Our Folding@Home team was gearing up to help find a way to fight COVID. Most of us aren’t doctors or disease specialists, but we found a way to help using our own talents.
What Is Folding
First, let’s understanding what folding is.
Proteins are the building blocks of our cells. We know that after basic biology classes. What we didn’t necessarily learn, however, was how they fold. Folding refers to the way the proteins structure themselves to take on different roles within our cells. If those proteins fold incorrectly, whether on their own or from an outside invader like a virus, diseases can occur within the human body.
That’s where Folding@Home comes into play. These labs simulate all the ways a protein can fold (and correct themselves) to form diseases. By studying how they fold incorrectly, and how the other proteins work to correct that process, we can learn about how to cure the diseases caused by improper folding. All of these simulations can be run through super computing work units to figure out a complex problem.
Our Personal Supercomputers
Folding@Home utilizes the unused space on our own computers to create a super computing network that breaks the work of figuring out folding patterns into small parts. It assigns those workloads to our computers in snippets, collects them, then puts them back together. Our personal machines become disease fighting supercomputers.
And you don’t have to just support COVID research. You can allow Folding@Home to send you whatever they have that needs work, or designate your machine for a specific cause they support. There is plenty of work to go around.
PC Matic Update
So how has PC Matic helped so far? Our team, compromised of both PC Matic employees and helpers like you, have earned over 6.5 billion points. You can take a look at our stats in the screenshot update below.
And if you missed this the first time around and would like to join, please visit our Folding@Home page to sign up as a PC Matic team member. You can also visit their FAQ page to learn more about what they do.
Thanks for being a part of the team!
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
