USEYOURPC TORESEARCH COVID
Here’s a great chance for you
to use the processing power
of your gaming PC for medical
research. The Folding@home
distributed computing project
has started processing work
units specifically for COVID-
research, so now is a great time
to put your PC’s spare CPU and
GPU clock cycles to work.
You can download the client
from foldingathome.org/
start-folding. If you then select
‘Any disease’ in the ‘I support
research fighting’ pulldown
menu, Folding@home will send
you COVID-19 work units (among other research bits and pieces) for
your PC to crunch.
‘We’re simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt
for new therapeutic opportunities,’ said Professor Greg Bowman,
leader of the Folding@home project in a recent blog post (custompc.
co.uk/StanfordCOVID19 ). ‘Viruses also have proteins that they
use to suppress our immune systems and reproduce themselves.
To help tackle coronavirus, we want to understand how these viral
proteins work and how we can design therapeutics to stop them.’
Folding@home uses the spare processing cycles from your PC’s
CPU and graphics cards for medical research, digitally simulating the
incredibly complex science of protein folding.
We started the Custom PC folding team back in 2004, and we’re
currently number 12 on the world leaderboard. However, interest
in the team dried up a couple of years ago, possibly because of the
popularity of cryptocurrency mining.We’d like to heartily thank some of
the dedicated folders who have kept
the team going in the meantime, such
as Shirty, DocJonz, PC_Rich, Slavcho,
BeezaBob and many others. We may
well bring back our dedicated Folding@
home page in the coming months, as
our team can potentially really help with
this research – let’s kick the Custom PC
Folding@home engine back into action.
You just need to download the client
and use the Custom PC team’s ID
number of 35947, although feel free
to fold for any other team if you want
as well. The most important thing, of
course, is that the work units are getting
crunched, rather than competition between teams.
You may well have a bit of a wait for work units, so please be
patient. Thanks largely to the PCMR team (number 225605 ), which
has heavily promoted the project on Reddit and social media, and
picked up plenty of momentum, loads of people have signed up to
Folding@home recently, which is great news, although Folding@
home has struggled to distribute work units to everyone quickly.
‘We’ve had such an enthusiastic response to our COVID-19 work
that you will see some intermittent downtime as we sprint to set up
more simulations,’ says Bowman. ‘Please be patient with us! There’s
a lot of valuable science to be done, and we’re getting it running as
quickly as we can.’Download foldingathome.org/start-folding
Custom PC’s team 35947
More info on the COVID-19 research custompc.co.uk/StanfordCOVIDJoin the Custom PC Folding@home team 35947
KOLINKLAUNCHES£50RGBCHASSIS
What’s that?Winner
We’re not running a ‘What’s that?’ competition
this month, but the winner from our
Issue 199 competition was Stuart
Henshaw, who correctly identified
the ADATA Spectrix D60G
memory from p57. Congratulations
Stuart, we’ll be in touch shortly to
get your be quiet! Dark Base Pro
900 case sent on its way to you!If you fancy some RGB case bling, but think you can’t afford, it Kolink’s
new £50 RGB chassis might be the answer. Coming in at £50 inc VAT,
the Kolink Balance has a digitally addressable RGB LED strip down
the front, which can be controlled by a switch on the I/O panel, or via
your motherboard’s RGB header.
The preinstalled 120mm exhaust fan also sports digitally
addressable RGB lighting, which can be seen through the tempered
glass side panel. Meanwhile, there’s room for CPU coolers up to
162mm tall, and graphics cards up to 370mm wide, with a vertical
mount for the latter, although it requires an optional PCI-E riser.
There’s even room for a 360mm/280mm radiator in the front, and
you get a PSU shroud too. The Kolink Balance is available to order
from overclockers.co.uk now.