Nvidia Asks Gamers to Dedicate GPU Power to Fighting Coronavirus
During the coronavirus pandemic, Nvidia is calling for gamers to utilize their spare graphics card power in order to fight the virus.
In a tweet, Nvidia encouraged people to download its [email protected] application. This application is described as “a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design and other types of molecular dynamics” – it means many computers can link together and dedicate their processing power to perform huge tasks.
Previously, the application had been used to help fight cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Influenza. Last week, an update was posted to the [email protected] application for an “initial wave of projects simulating potentially druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).”
The hope is that these tasks will assist researchers in understanding how the coronavirus interacts with humans and how that process might be able to be disrupted through antibodies or other “small molecules.”
Of course, should you feel like you need all of your computer’s GPU power in order to play some long games over the course of a quarantine, you can turn off the process and get that power back whenever you want.
Nvidia is not the only company pushing out measures to fight the coronavirus: Google is launching a website for coronavirus tests, while Microsoft has developed a coronavirus-tracker using Bing.
