“Folding@home is currently the most used and well known distributed computing project where anyone can provide their home or office computers’ computing power to the joint effort,” he says. “The project has been researching multiple diseases with a similar method for almost 20 years, but the Coronavirus epidemic has caused a major peak in their user base.”
Karhu points out that the engineering team had been thinking along the lines of contributing to a distributed computing project when customers started to request this type of functionality for their idle media servers. Folding@home appeared to be the perfect match.
“Folding@home offers great tools and instructions for integrating their client to a Linux-based system such as the Analog Way’s Picturall media server,” he notes. The engineering team started to work on the project and their first working software version was ready March 20. Almost all the computers and media servers in Picturall’s labs have been participating to Folding@home since.”
An update was tested and released on March 23 with first announcements made to the Analog Way's Picturall Media Servers user groups in social media. “After that, Analog Way Picturall customers around the world have started to put their media servers to good use with the 2.9.6 Folding@home release,” Karhu reports.