There are lots of ways for airsofters to contribute in the fight against the spread of the Covid-19 and we hope many the airsoft community are stepping up to help in any way that they can. If you think you cannot volunteer to the frontlines, unable to donate something needed, or you have been told to stay put at home, you can actually still contribute in helping find a cure with an ubiquitous device that you use at home.

Chances are you are reading this story with a computer connected to the internet instead of a mobile device and that’s a very important tool in the fight against the coronavirus. Many airsofters are gamers and since they are gamers they are usually equipped with powerful computers with multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs which are then connected to the internet to play graphic intensive multiplayer games such as Call of Duty and Fortnite.

With these computers owned by airsofters/gamers, they can lend their computing power to the Folding@Home which is a “distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.”

With thousands of powerful gaming PCs and other computers connected under Folding@Home, it now has computing power of 470 petaflops of output that is greater than the world’s seven most powerful super computers combined. With that, Folding@Home has announced that they are taking up the fight against the Covid-19 virus where researchers are working to understand the structures of potential drug targets for the virus that could help in the design of new therapies.

To be a part of this distributed computing project, you can download the Folding@Home here, install it and upon launching the client in a browser, select contribute to “Any Disease” and start folding (the folding here is about the virus proteins that wiggle, fold and unfold as they are not stagnant. They turn into various shapes so these are needed to be understood in how it reacts to ACE2 receptor, which in this case is the receptor protein on the lung cell as explained by the project.

Over 400,00 new volunteers have already downloaded and running Folding@Home on their computers from home in the past two weeks. If you have some spare computers that are idle, you can install Folding@Home on them to provide more computing power.

One example of super computing power out to good use, Summit, the world’s most powerful super computer have been recruited to the fight and the team using it have already identified 77 drug compounds that may help in fighting the virus. Just imagine what Folding@Home can do as it’s more powerful than Summit.

Let your computer join the fight against Covid-19 as Folding@Home runs in the background whilst you frag enemies in Call of Duty: Warzone or Fortnite Battle Royale games since you can play airsoft for the meantime. It will help you feel good that you can still contribute to the effort whilst doing online gaming.