Scheme using spare CPU capacity to fight COVID-19 gains backing from UK resellers, Michael Dell and others
Michael Dell urges anyone with a PC to join the fight against COVID-19 by sharing unused compute power, while AV reseller Creative Technology's UK arm donates 21 media servers to the cause
A scheme harnessing unused compute power to aid research efforts against COVID-19 is rapidly gaining backing from vendors and tech suppliers across the globe, with Michael Dell the latest to lend his endorsement.
A month after putting out the call for more unused computational resources, Folding@home announced on Wednesday that it had crossed the exaflop barrier, which it claimed makes it ten times faster than the IBM Summit supercomputer (which has also been enlisted in the fight against coronavirus).
Run by Stanford University, Folding@home is a distributed computing project that has traditionally relied on around 30,000 global users lending their spare compute power to research cancer and other diseases. After turning its attentions to COVID-19 last month, it now has over 400,000 PC users backing it.
The scheme is gaining backing from the world's largest vendors including Dell and HPE, whose local UK team claimed yesterday that they had already deployed 40 cores from one of its London labs.
But UK channel firms are also putting their shoulder squarely behind the cause, with global audio visual reseller Creative Technology's UK arm having dedicated 21 media servers and one 2019 Mac Pro to the project.
It said it is "fighting back against coronavirus in the best way we know how" after finding its media servers sitting idle following a reduction in its core live events business.
"Researchers from all over the world can now use the CPU and GPU capacity of our media servers to draw, calculate and analyse complex formulas and graphics in the global fight against COVID-19," it said.
Softcat's chief technology, Craig Lodzinski, is among the other UK channel figures calling for more people to join the scheme.
Interested parties can donate their unused compute resources by downloading the Folding@home app here.