Haptic Folders
In the face of the global pandemic, many people have worked to find solutions to the hardships we face. Haptic technology is theoretically well suited to alleviate disruption imposed by quarantine and social distancing, but in practice it would be difficult to reach people with new haptic apps and hardware with the world as it is today.
So I’ve been thinking about how we might nonetheless be able to help as a community. Using our spare computing cycles to simulate protein folding is easy to get started and has a chance of making a small but direct impact on the problem.
Folding@Home is a Stanford project that uses distributed computing to simulate protein folding. The hope is that scientists will be able to utilize the data in search of pharmaceutical interventions for Coronavirus.
Lately they’ve begun weekly targeted sprints to support the Covid Moonshot project.
Getting this going on your machine should take less than 10 minutes:
- Download and run the installer for your OS (Mac, Windows, or Linux)
- Choose a name that will identify you on the public ranking system.
- Use the HapticFolders team number to contribute to our collective rankings: 250199
That’s about it. When the FAHControl app is running, you’ll be served work units automatically. Because there have been a lot of new machines joining Folding@Home lately, you might see a delay in receiving work units. However, if you leave the app running, this should resolve itself.
Here’s the HapticFolders stats page. Feel free to share this far and wide and recruit more computing cycles to the team.
Dave Birnbaum 