UPDATE – Videos, How you can fight COVID-19
|The world got real crazy real fast. Thanks to Coronavirus, many of you (including me) are stuck at home, and apparently are here on YouTube to pass the time. Now this is a short update video, along with a guide on how to setup folding at home so you can lend your idle PC power to fighting this mighty pain in the arse. Here’s the time code for the folding guide.
So, update. Because of the virus, products aren’t coming in for me to look at much. I’ve got a few bits and pieces, and a few tests and educational style videos either done or in the works, but for the time being I’m going to stop posting on Wednesdays for now. There will still be a stream on Thursday nights, and I might do some game streams on Wednesdays instead, maybe. Hope that’s alright.
Right, folding. The concept is pretty simple, you can use your CPU and GPU(s) to crunch the numbers on protein folding, which can help scientists understand the virus, and create treatments and vaccinations to literally save lives. You can set it up to only start when you aren’t using the power anyway, so your gaming or work would be unaffected – or you can be a baller and have it go full tilt 24/7, especially if you have old PCs around you can plug in and get running.
How do you do it? Well, go to the link in the description and download the client and install. Open it up – it’ll open in a web browser by default, and you’ll want to create an identity, so pick a username, put a team code in – I’ve put Linus’ team number down there because why not – and go to the passkey website and put in your email and username, then it’ll email you that key. Paste it in, then you are good, it’s running, it’s folding away.
If you want to have it only fold when idle, look in your taskbar tray, find the folding at home icon, right click and check the Idle option. You can also open the main app from that menu too, if you want better control over what it’s doing and what hardware it’s using – say only one of your GPUs, or only GPU, whatever you want, plus set it to full power so you can really churn through those calculations.
And that’s it. You might find it to not work flawlessly, that’s in part thanks to so many people already throwing their horsepower at it, which is making folding at home’s servers crash, but just let it do it’s thing, maybe restart the program or system if it really looks stuck.
So there you go, you can help fight coronavirus. Now get folding!
Links:
Folding@Home: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
Passkey: https://apps.foldingathome.org/getpasskey
Linus Tech Tips Team: 223518