The Cardano Foundation has called on the community to support a distributed computing project aimed at developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. A large number of its staff has decided to take part in the Folding@Home project, giving out their personal computers’ CPU to power scientific research.

Distributed computing to the rescue

The Cardano Foundation, an independent entity tasked with promoting the Cardano blockchain, has called on its community to join the Folding@Home project. In a blog post published on Mar. 19, the Foundation introduced the project and invited people to join what could be one of the most important scientific efforts this decade.

Folding@home (FAH) is a distributed computing project focused on disease research that simulates the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins involved in many different diseases. The complex calculations needed to complete these simulations require an enormous amount of computing power, in which the platform spreads out across thousands of different computers in order to speed up research.

The project is currently heavily focused on fighting the coronavirus outbreak by simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to find new ways to treat and cure the disease.

Andy Hendrikx, the community manager at the Cardano Foundation, was the first to suggest for the foundation to take part in the project and has called on the entire community to step up and join the effort.

Calling all Cardanians to help find the coronavirus outbreak

In a Mar. 19 blog post, the Cardano Foundation called on the entire Cardano community to come together and help fight the coronavirus outbreak. As a large part of the Foundation staff decided to take part in the project, they extended the invitation to Cardano’s supporters.

The Foundation published detailed instructions on how to get started with Folding@home and shared a special team number that allows users to let others see their contributions are associated with the Cardano community team.

A later update to the Foundation’s blog post revealed that there has been a huge surge in interest for Folding@home, which led to an increased network load. This, the Foundation explained, caused users to not be able to access full Cardano team stats or get work assigned for a short period of time.

Team Cardano is currently ranked 4,077th out of 239,176 teams that donated their CPU to Folding@home. Stats from the official project website revealed that the team has completed 470 certified pieces of research, called work units, as of Mar. 22.

Those interested in joining the effort to fight the coronavirus outbreak and directly help scientific research can do so by following the instructions given by the Cardano Foundation, or find further information on how to help on the official Folding@home website.