Cardano Foundation's Community Management Team supports Folding@Home for Covid-19 research

Join the Cardano Foundation’s Community Management Team on Folding@Home

Further to Nathan Kaiser’s recent post about Covid-19, the time to come together as a Cardano community and as the human race to flatten the curve is now. How can we make it tangible and material? What kind of action could we take?

On Thursday 19 March 2020 during an all-hands internal community team call, Andy Hendrikx (@Andy_Hendrikx), Community Manager at the Cardano Foundation, suggested our community support the Folding@Home project. A large number of the Foundation staff decided to take part in this project even though this is not an organizational CSR initiative.

The Folding@Home is a project focused on disease research. The problems researchers are solving, such as understanding the virus, require so many computer calculations and they need to borrow computational power to help find the cure.

How does it work?

Folding@Home offers a software program that can be installed onto your personal computer. As soon as it is running and connected to external systems, it will start using part of your machine’s computational resources. Your computational resources will power efforts to discover the proteins that Covid-19 virus uses to protect its cells. The aim of this effort is to create medicines and vaccines to cure and protect from Covid-19 by combining the resources to study this virus’s proteins. Participation is free, apart from minor electricity usage.

Interested in helping out? Here are a few simple steps on how to participate.

Web Client:

  • Go to https://foldingathome.org/ and install the client for your OS. (The pictures shown are for iOS)
  • Use the folding “Power” slider to adjust the amount of CPU (or for some GPU) power you wish to allocate.
  • Adjust the “When” options, to decide when you would like to contribute.
  • Optional: If you want your contributions to be associated with the Cardano community team, change the team number from “0” to “244483” via the “Change Identity” button in the top left.
  • Please leave the "I support research fighting" set to * “Any disease”, as this setting is currently focusing on Covid19 research.
  • Click “Start Folding” and off you go! :rocket: :dna:


(Pic above: you can also get a Passkey for extra identity security and to claim any bonus points.)


(Screenshot above: web client interface)

There are also a plethora of instructional Youtube videos available, in case you need more information on the Folding@Home project.

You can view the “Cardano” team statistics via this webpage.

(Please note: The Folding@Home infrastructure is currently receiving major attention and network load worldwide from (new) participants. As a result, you may not be able to get the full Cardano team stats, your own stats, or get “Work Units” assigned every now and then.
We suggest to leave things running for a while anyway and checking back from time to time. You can read the Twitter thread from the Folding@Home team here. Following them will also help you keep up to date for any updates.)

DISCLAIMER: Please remember that this is not our (CF/EMURGO/IOHK) software and we are only its fellow users. If you have any trouble – or if your computer overheats – please contact the Folding@Home team for support on their forum.


Please hit that LIKE button and let us know here in the thread if you are taking part.

Good luck Folding@Home! :dna: :syringe: :hospital:

31 Likes

I’m taking part, but I have no idea why I’m not showing up on https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/244483s

4 Likes

There may also be some delay when stats finally get updated/displayed. Let’s give it a couple days or so to see if anything changes. :+1:

For those interested, here are my stats:

4 Likes

I just joined you guys and this is a totally awesome idea. :clap: :clap:

5 Likes

Awesome… that’s the word I was looking for. :grin:

So great to feel I can contribute to the fight! :blush:

5 Likes

I just joined. Let us show the strength of the Cardano Community. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

ADA North Pool has joined this initiative and would like to thank the Cardano Foundation team for suggesting such an effort. Sadly we could only dedicated a 2nd computer to this but hopefully every bit counts.

https://adanorthpool.com/2020/03/20/ada-north-pool-joines-cardano-community-effort-for-research-on-covid-19/

3 Likes

This Machine is reporting in for duty!

And I finally get some use for my RTX 2070 again, it has been idle for a month now! :grin:

3 Likes

It would be great if everyone with a social media profile shares this to its followers.

First Work Unit is running :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I am in guys!!! F… nCOVID

3 Likes

It appears you have to complete a Work Unit first

1 Like

I’ve tried to setup Folding@Home multiple times but this was finally the motivation to get it done :slight_smile:
Now part of the group!

7 Likes

Thanks Seba. Please spread the word at EMURGO :slight_smile:

1 Like

Just installed the Folding Home webclient without issue and I applaud the initiative taken by the Cardarno Foundation team and @Andy_Hendrikx community manager for sharing.

4 Likes

It is a good time to be alive when I’m broke yet can still donate computing power for the benefit of humans.
Is there a way to run this on an iPad or an Android device? My relatives have quite a few devices that are wasted not being used.

2 Likes

Hey, thanks for joining the effort!
No, unfortunately a mobile app is not something that seems to work (at least not for me) yet!
However, this is the iOS app I found in the Apple Store (use at own risk). Although, I have no idea how to set it up, so if anyone knows, feel free to share it with us here.

There also seems to be something for Android here I think…
The core engine seems to be available via their GitHub, but probably needs some dev skills to set up?
(I have no idea: cc @rdlrt)
:sweat_smile: But by all means, feel free to try it out at your own convenience/risk.

If the above indeed doesn’t work, or maybe it does but not easy or good enough, perhaps if we can appeal to the folding at home via Twitter (@foldingathome)? :+1:

3 Likes

I can rule out that this is the problem because I have already finished quite a few work units.

Same here. I can see that from https://client.foldingathome.org/ the total for the team is growing. Was 2.6M before, and is 3,13M as of writing. My Name (pick a unique name, or you will get mixed up with others if you search yourself) does not show up, nor does my score in the Cardano team.

It seems that stats is rarely updated, while https://client.foldingathome.org/ is showing the latest teams total score more frequently.

3 Likes

LatinoStakingPool joined. Awesome to know we can actually help with something tangible.

3 Likes

Yeah I think stats are either updated periodically (once every day or two?) or they’re still coping with the massive influx of new users and are trying to improve on their infrastructure. Maybe a combination of both, but yeah it may take a few days until any kind of (personal) stats are visible.

Thanks to all those that recently joined! :+1: