As COVID-19 (coronavirus) continues to spread and affect more people, reasearchers are working tirelessly to find an antivirus for it. I was wondering if there was any way I could contribute to the efforts using my computer. Turns out there is!

The Institute for Protein Design at Washington University has successfully predicted the atomic-scale structue of an important coronavirus protein which will be used to try to create vaccines for the virus. To find out more on the findings, read this post.

The findings were thanks to hundreds of CPU contributors via BOINC.

BOINC is an open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources.

By joining the Rosetta@home project and the team r/Covid-19, you can contribute to the ongoing research to help find a vaccine for coronavirus.

The setup is quite simple! Below are the following steps to follow in order to get up and running with BOINC and start putting your CPU power to good use.

  1. Install BOINC
  2. Join the Rosetta@home project
  3. Go to your profile settings to join team r/Covid19

Once you have followed those steps and have the BOINC manager up and running on your computer, you shouldn’t need to do anything else. The BOINC manager will download jobs from the project and begin using your computer to process them. Easy as that!

You can update the computing preferences under your profile settings to limit CPU usage, disk usage, memory usage, etc.