What does a computer virus have in common with the Coronavirus (COVID-19)? Plenty, believe it or not, as technology can be used to help solve both.

The TEAMARES research team has found that our hash cracker Cthulhu can be used to run computer simulations that mimic the same complex protein folding that occurs in viruses. We’re sharing our findings with Folding@Home to simulate how the virus behaves – data that we hope can be used by doctors and healthcare professionals to develop potential vaccines.

Folding@Home is a project established to assist researchers around the world to take up the fight against COVID-19. It leverages complex algorithms to simulate protein folding in order to examine diseases such as COVID-19. This project allows people with laptops or even complex GPU machines to provide computing power to help provide those protein folding simulations.

Similar to cryptocurrency mining, people who are not medical experts are able to leverage their own expertise to help solve global issues such as COVID-19. With the help of Cthulhu, TEAMARES has been processing jobs straight from Folding@Home on our CPU and GPU processing power. Folding@Home then takes that data to help in researching viruses.

We’re hoping our participation in this project will help medical professionals across the globe find a cure. For more information, visit foldingathome.org, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @CRITICALSTART and @TeamAresSec, or via our LinkedIn and Facebook channels to stay up to date as the situation unfolds.

 

by Quentin Rhoads-Herrera | Director of Professional Services, TEAMARES

March 16th, 2020