Roehampton Esports has joined the Folding@Home project to help with the research on Covid-19. All of 20 gaming PCs at Roehampton Esports Arena are being used to help researchers at Stanford University to better understand how coronavirus works.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is especially useful for medical research into Azheimer’s, Huntingtin’s, many forms of cancer as well as coronavirus.
A single machine at the Roehampton Esports Arena might not have a big impact on scientific research and is not able to compete with supercomputers, but when it joins the massive network of Folding@Home, it becomes one of the world’s fastest computing systems. Pande Lab has produced 223 scientific research papers based on the results from Folding@Home output since its launch in 2000 and now they have their sights on coronavirus.
As of 19th March Roehampton Esports has contributed over 600,000 points to the Folding@Home project. The first goal of 1 million points is expected to be achieved by the end of the week and the next goal is 10,000,000 points. The space, purely dedicated to esports practice and competitions for Roehampton students and esports scholarship recipients is powered by Zowie and is equipped with 240hz monitors and top-tier peripherals. The machines working on the project are all running i7-7700k CPUs and GTX 1080 graphic cards.
Not all current projects at Folding@Home are for coronavirus. Roehampton Esports machines have also worked on, amongst many others, project 13828 that simulates several myosins found in the human body. This research, performed by Justin R. Porter at Washington University can help better understand diseases that result from defects in myosin, including Usher syndrome as well as hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathies.
Roehampton Esports put out a call to action and invited students across the country to join the project. A large number of student societies and esports organisations are joining the project with their home gaming PCs.
Watch our video below on how to join the project and check out the official Folding@Home website.
Find out more about Roehampton Esports.