Use your Raspberry Pi to fight Covid19

What is Fold for Covid, and how does it help?

The Fold for Covid project aims to make it easy to donate spare compute capacity to support COVID-19 research with a few simple steps. This effort contributes to the Rosetta@Home project, led by the Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington, which uses distributed computing to help scientists and doctors find potential treatments for COVID-19.

Your contributions help researchers look for proteins that bind to the famous “spike” protein on COVID-19. By finding these binding proteins, doctors hope to develop medicines that prevent the virus from entering healthy cells.

A few weeks ago, I was setting the dev environment in one of the many Raspberry Pis we have in our IoT lab at Rent24, and one of the ads displayed on the Balena Etcher app cought my attention. I clicked on it and stumbled upon with The Fold for Covid homepage. I've hear about Rosetta@Home and SETI@home before, but I was surprised they were already using the same technology to fight Coronavirus. I followed the process suggested on their website:

1. Downloaded the Fold for Covid project software.
2. Downloaded and installed balenaEtcher.
3. Launched balenaEtcher and flashed a few SD cards.
4. Booted the bunch of Raspberry Pis, and connected them to our network, boom! 💥