IBM’s World Community Grid is a volunteer network of distributed devices which donate their spare processing power to help good causes. Right now there is no greater cause than the current Coronavirus pandemic. Across the world people are working to combat this awful virus, and we can play our part from home by donating the power of our spare Raspberry Pi and other devices to help find potential treatments.
The OpenPandemics project is led by researchers from Forli Lab at Scripps Research and they have linked up with IBM’s World Community Grid to harness the power of a distributed network of computers.
This distributed network is made from thousands of machines donating their spare processing time and power to run millions of simulations showing how small molecules interact with the virus, a process known as molecular docking. It is hoped that these simulations will offer a possible treatment for the virus. All of the simulation data is sent back to the Scripps Research team for further analysis.
By lending your spare processing power you are helping to accelerate the experiments and provide data that will hopefully alleviate the suffering of many.
