CoreWeave, the largest Etherium Miner in the U.S., redirects the processing power of 6,000 graphics cards to Folding@home research for coronavirus treatment.
CoreWeave said it will redirect the power of half of its graphics processors for research purposes at Stanford University's Folding@home project. At the end of February, researchers announced an initiative aimed at stimulating coronavirus research with a unique approach to pharmaceutical development. This project brings together thousands of computers from around the world to create a distributed supercomputer for disease research.
CoreWeave co-founder and technical director Brian Venturo said the project has a chance to find a cure for the virus. CoreWeave has joined the initiative and doubled the capacity of its entire network of researchers using its GPUs, which are designed to process repetitive computations.
According to Venturo, these 6,000 GPUs accounted for about 0.2% of the total Etherium hash rate, earning about 28 ETH per day - $3600 so far. There is no cure for coronavirus yet, although various groups are working on vaccines and research to combat the disease, including the IBM supercomputer. Venturo noted that Project Folding@home has previously contributed to the development of other important drugs.
"Their research has had a profound impact on the development of advanced drugs to protect against HIV, and we hope our computing power will help fight the coronavirus," said Venturo.
Coronavirus has damaged the economies and health systems of many countries. Italy and Spain have introduced strict isolation regimes. All over the world, conferences are canceled and shops and restaurants are closed to stop the disease from spreading. This contributes to increased fear and uncertainty in financial markets.
World Computer
When the idea of using GPUs for coronavirus research was announced in CoreWeave, the team did not put off participation in the project for a long time. According to Venturo, the test system was launched and started working "within minutes". CoreWeave gave more than half of all computing power to the coronavirus research project.
Folding@home is a decentralized project. Its researchers use the computing power of anyone who wants to participate in the initiative, even if the user can only offer his own laptop with a small amount of unused computing power.
The new initiative uses the computing power to find useful information about the coronavirus. One user can find a "solution" to the problem and distribute this information to the rest of the team.
"Their protein model is trying to find potential 'loopholes' where existing FDA-approved drugs or other known compounds can help slow down or treat the virus," Venturo said.
"Viruses contain proteins that are used to multiply and suppress our immune system. To help fight the coronavirus, we want to understand how these viral proteins work and how we can develop drugs to stop them," explained on Folding@home.
Simulating these proteins and looking at them from different angles helps scientists better understand them, which has the potential to help create a cure. Computers accelerate this process by shuffling changes very quickly.
"Our goal is to use computer simulations to understand the moving parts of a protein. Watching how the atoms in a protein move relative to each other is important because it collects valuable information that is not available by other means," it says.
Miners on the guard of health
Venturo encourages other miners to join the project. However, even without these calls for participation, the other cryptovite miners are already taking action.
Last week, Tulip.tools founder Johann Tanzer called on the "bakers" of the Tezos (analogs of the miners in this blockhouse) to take action, promising to send 15 XTZ worth about $20 to whoever provides the most Folding@home capacity. To Tanzer's surprise, the initiative received a response - 20 Tezos baker groups are now contributing to the project. The reward from Tanzer increased to about $600 due to donations from Tezos users.
But this does not mean that all the miners can participate in the project. ASIC miners are designed specifically for mining and, according to Venturo, will not be able to join the initiative.
"This is one of the remarkable features of the Etherium's mining ecosystem - in fact, it's the largest video card-based computational resource on the planet. We were able to switch our equipment to help fight the global pandemic in minutes," said Venturo. "After discussing with some industry experts, we believe the chances of success with the work done by Folding@Home to develop the drug will be in the range of 2-5%.
Not everyone in the cryptovoltaic industry is trying to help fight the coronavirus - fraudsters, on the contrary, are trying to make money from the pandemic. The other day, it became known that the scammers stole more than $2 million in cryptovoltaic currencies in panic because of coronavirus. They sell medical masks and antiseptics for cryptov currencies, but do not send goods.
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