Nix McRetro
There are times when I miss university and getting to learn more about how all the things work. The best thing I personally felt I could do from home was donate some compute time and encourage more people to crunch more numbers through Rosetta@home and Folding@home.
Rosetta@home uses the Rosetta software platform for protein structure prediction and protein design, while Folding@home runs distributed molecular simulations. Both were contributing to coronavirus research in March 2020, although they were doing different kinds of calculations and not every work unit was necessarily about SARS-CoV-2.
Both are important in different ways. Both now run on my Intel NUC, the NUC8I7BEH. Soon I will upgrade to a fanless solution as the whine of that little fan is driving me crazy. The good news? It tends to stabilise with all four cores chugging along at 3.2GHz at load. Jump on board for science!
See my progress here!
Update 28th March 2020: I’ve since moved the NUC8i7BEH into an Akasa Turing fanless case. After running Folding@home and Rosetta@home overnight at around 22 degrees ambient, the CPU seemed to top out around 71 degrees. Way past cool!