Ethereum (ETH) – As the world struggles against a fast growing threat of coronavirus many in the crypto space rea taking swift action. We recently wrote about what XRP is doing to slow the curve, now let’s look at what others in the crypto and blockchain space are doing.
CoreWeave, the largest U.S. miner on the Ethereum blockchain recently redirected the processing power of 6,000 specialized computer chips toward research to find a therapy for the coronavirus. These graphics processing units (GPUs) will be pointed toward Stanford University’s Folding@home, a long-standing research effort that unveiled a project on Feb. 27 specifically to boost coronavirus research by way of a unique approach to developing pharmaceutical drugs: connecting thousands of computers from around the world to form a distributed supercomputer for disease research.
On Tuesday night we began donating the compute power of over 6,000 GPUs to the @foldingathome projects researching Coronavirus (COVID-19). We are proud to be able to donate our flexible GPU compute to a project like this.
— CoreWeave (@CoreWeave) March 13, 2020
CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Brian Venturo said the project has at least a shot at finding a drug for the virus. As such, CoreWeave has responded by doubling the power of the entire network with its GPUs, which are designed to handle repetitive calculations. According to Venturo, those 6,000 GPUs made up about 0.2 percent of Ethereum’s total hashrate, earning roughly 28 ETH per day, worth about $3,600 at press time.
Folding@home project has been operating since October 2000, and operates by pooling idle processing resources of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems to run statistical simulations analysing complex proteins. On 2 March 2020, Folding@home announced that it had over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power, making it one of the most powerful super computing systems in the world.
Researchers at Stanford University founded Folding@home as a distributed computer research project. The initiative harnesses the processing power of organizations and individuals all over the world to investigate the function of viral proteins. In doing so, scientists hope to gain a greater understanding of how viruses reproduce and affect the immune system.
When the idea of using GPUs for coronavirus research was initially brought to CoreWeave the team didnt think twice according to Brian Venturo: They had a test system up and running “within minutes.” Since then, the project quickly snowballed. CoreWeave has been contributing over half of the overall computing power going into the coronavirus wing of Folding@home.
“The idea of ‘should we do this?’ was never really brought up, it kind of just happened. We were all enthusiastic that we might be able to help,” Venturo added.
According to Michael Bacina at medium.com: “Unlike the Bitcoin blockchain, which is dominated by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to the extend that mining with common GPUs is practically impossible, Ethereum mining continues to be primarily done by GPUs. This presented an opportunity to help for CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Brian Venturo, who said: This is one of the great things about the Ethereum mining ecosystem, it’s basically the largest GPU compute resource on the planet. We were able to redeploy our hardware to help fight a global pandemic in minutes. On that basis, CoreWeave has contributed over 6,000 of its GPUs to the Folding@home project. It has also agreed to donate 1 houhttps://twitter.com/foldingathome/status/1243632320059510791r of GPU time to Folding@home for every $1 spent on its CGI rendering website, concierge render. With the world reeling from the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, and the urgent need for a vaccine and other effective treatments, Venturo commented that: [Folding@home’s] research had profound impacts on the development of front-line HIV defense drugs, and we are hoping our [computing power] will aid in the fight against coronavirus, That being said, Venturo recognizes that the contribution to Folding@home’s research is still a long shot, acknowledging that: After discussing with some industry experts […] we believe the chance of success in utilizing the work done on Folding@Home to deliver a drug to market to be in the 2–5% range At this stage, with the COVID-19/Corona Virus crisis continuing to grow, we should be taking every possible edge we have as we race towards understanding this disease.”
@foldingathome recently explained on twitter why they are so important in the fight against infectious diseases:
