TTC Group has donated its spare unused computer capacity to assist vaccine researchers in the fight against Covid-19
Folding@Home is a project run for the last 20 years by the Pande Lab at Stanford University. It is a volunteer project which organises thousands of ordinary personal computers to break down big digital simulations of a virus that causes the diseases into millions of bite-size chunks.
It aims to understand disease mechanisms (proteins) at the molecular level then find weaknesses which medicines can potentially cure. Its software fetches a small processing job from the organisation’s servers, runs its calculations, then returns results to be incorporated into research studies. When it is done, your machine fetches the next job.
The more simulations can be undertaken, the quicker researchers around the world can fight the virus and find a vaccine. Folding@Home, which has been working on cures for cancers and Parkinson’s, added Covid-19 to the list of diseases to its research in March 2020.
TTC Group joined the programme April 9th combining its spare computer processing power with the rest of the folding community, making the world’s fastest supercomputer in the fight against Covid-19. TTC Group has folded 950 and climbing work units, ranking it in the top 83,000 contributors out of 2.6 million users worldwide, making a sizeable contribution to the Covid-19 vaccine research.
Jim Kirkwood CEO TTC Group commented: “With our workforce working remotely during this crisis and having a number of spare desktops in our offices, the Folding@Home project was an ideal way for us to utilise our unused resources at this time and provide support against this terrible disease.”
