How to Use Your Mac to Help the Fight Against Coronavirus
Folding@home is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics.
In addition to cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's, Folding@home has
announced that it is tackling a disease that has been dominating the headlines: COVID-19.
The project is joining researchers around the world who are working to better understand the Coronavirus to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies.
By downloading Folding@Home on your Mac, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers are working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for COVID-19 that could aid in the design of new therapies.
<center><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Help us in the fight against COVID-19! Download the app at:
https://t.co/andJ4PDzVl #Coronavirus #2019nCov #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 https://t.co/BSmiV8phh1</p>— Folding@home (@foldingathome)
February 27, 2020 <script async src="
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></center>
The following steps show you how to get started with the Mac app. Before you install the Folding@home client, be aware that it can consume a lot of CPU cycles, so depending on what you use your Mac for, you may be better off running it only during times when your Mac is otherwise idle.
<ol><li>Open a browser tab and visit
https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/.</li>
<li>Click on <strong>fah-installer_7.5.1_x86_64.mpkg.zip</strong> link to download the Folding@Home installer.
<li>Run the installer and enter your admin user name and password when prompted. </li>
<li>When the installer has completed, ignore the webpage that it opens for now, and launch the <strong>FAHControl</strong> app from the <strong>Applications/Folding@home</strong> folder.
<li>You'll see a prompt warning you that the client hasn't been assigned an identity. Click <strong>Fold Anonymously</strong> or <strong>Configure Identity</strong>. The latter option ensures that the points you earn will be credited to you, but you'll need to enter a username. (You can also join a team – MacRumors' Team ID is 3446.)
<li>To ensure your CPU cycles are contributing to COVID-19, click the <strong>Configure</strong> button, then select the <strong>Advanced</strong> tab and choose <strong>Any</strong> in the <strong>Cause Preference</strong> dropdown menu. (The project is prioritizing coronavirus among the Any category.)
<li>Click <strong>Save</strong>.</li></ol> You can view a visual representation of the molecules your Mac is analyzing in real time by clicking the <strong>Viewer</strong> button. You can also access the web client at
https://client.foldingathome.org for a better visual rendering.
Since this is a power-hungry endeavor, the Folding@home client will automatically pause whenever your Mac laptop switches to battery power. You can control this setting in <strong>Configure -> Advanced -> Power</strong>.<div class="linkback">Tag:
COVID-19 Coronavirus</div>
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How to Use Your Mac to Help the Fight Against Coronavirus" first appeared on
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How to Use Your Mac to Help the Fight Against Coronavirus
