https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-03-18-folding-home-asks-pc-gamers-to-help-research-covid-19

PC gamers are being asked to donate their unused computational power to help researchers better understand the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Folding@home is a distributed computing project for disease research which uses idle resources to simulate protein folding.

By downloading Folding@home, PC gamers can help researchers develop treatments for COVID-19

"The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs," said Folding@home director Greg Bowman in a post detailing the project.

"While we will rapidly release the simulation data sets for others to use or analyse, we aim to look for alternative conformations and hidden pockets within the most promising drug targets, which can only be seen in simulation and not in static X-ray structures," said Folding@home computational chemist John Chodera.

"We hope that these structures -- once validated by emerging compound screening data -- could help direct the virtual screening campaigns or the targeting of new pockets for which atomistic structures were not yet available."

Time to put my 3900x + 1080 to work

Already doing so, but I use BOINC with Rosetta@home instead of the Folding@Home client, and it has some early successes already.

Apart from that, I help realize climate models, map asteroids, the milky way and the universe, try to solve a math problem and find alien life (SETI being for which BOINC was originally made btw), and help out in some other fields with more diverse programs like Moo Wrapper (which is basically a wrapper for distributed.net, hence the name), yoyo@home and the World community Grid. But I boosted Rosetta and to a lesser degree the World Community Grid over the others as their research takes precedence now.

Oh, and some projects also make good use of the GPUs (but discrete and iGP/APU), so don't let their power go to waste, either. Doing so for a long time already btw.

I would but Nvidia won't give me my 3080ti already.