Thousands of cryptocurrency mining rigs will provide computing power to a COVID-19 research effort. As COVID-19 continues to spread, researchers are focusing on virus sequencing, protein detection, treatment development and vaccine testing. One such project is Stanford University’s Folding@home, which is working to develop therapeutic drugs that could alleviate — if not cure — the respiratory illness COVID-19 and its most severe symptoms.
Folding@home has previously helped develop drugs to fight HIV, and it is hoped that the team’s work on determining protein structures could prove valuable in the fight against COVID-19. Computers that can quickly and automatically change protein shapes and variants are crucial. Folding@home’s work involves screening through protein structures and FDA- approved drug compounds that could inhibit or treat the disease. Folding@home says that proteins have many moving parts, so researchers want to see the protein “in action.” In addition, structures that cannot be monitored experimentally may hold the “key” to discovering a new treatment.
As CoinDesk reports, the largest miner of the American Ethereum blockchain , CoreWeave , is providing the computing power of thousands of GPUs to the effort to combat COVID-19. CoreWeave is proud to support this effort with over 6,000 high-end GPUs . GPUs, especially when combined as a distributed network of “supercomputers,” can handle repetitive calculations at rapid speeds .
CoreWeave CTO Brian Venturo said that over 50% of the computing power currently available from cryptocurrency mining systems to the Folding@home team researching COVID-19 comes from miners who previously earned several thousand dollars a day.
Additionally, Nvidia announced last week that it is offering free 90-day licenses for Parabricks, a platform based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit that provides GPU power and pipelines for research projects. Users can expect access to GPUs as well as compute power that could improve sequencing data analysis speeds. Nvidia will provide a license to any researcher participating in the global COVID-19 response, and will monitor the situation and may extend the licenses.
Finally, it is worth noting that according to the John Hopkins COVID-19 tracking table, there have been approximately 246,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 163 countries and territories so far.
