The largest Ethereum miner in the United States "donates" computing power in support of new crown virus drug research

CoreWeave, the largest U.S. miner on the Ethereum blockchain, is using 6000 dedicated computer chips for research to find a cure for the new crown virus.

This GPU computing power will be transferred to Stanford University's Folding @ home, a research effort launched on February 27 that uses unique methods to develop drugs to study the new crown virus: it connects thousands of computers around the world , Forming a distributed supercomputer for disease research.

CoreWeave co-founder and CTO Brian Venturo said the project had at least a chance to find a drug to treat the virus. As a result, CoreWeave doubles the processing power of the entire network with its GPU (for processing repetitive calculations).

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According to Venturo, these 6000 GPUs account for about 0.2% of the total computing power of Ethereum, and about 28 Ethereum can be mined every day, which is worth $ 3864 as of press time.

There is currently no cure for the new crown virus (although many organizations, including IBM's supercomputers, are working on vaccines and research to combat the disease). Venturo noted that Folding @ home has made significant breakthroughs in helping the development of other important drugs.

"Their research has had a profound impact on the development of first-line anti-AIDS drugs, and we hope our computing power can help fight the new crown virus."

The new crown virus has caused significant losses around the world. Italy and Spain are blocked. Conferences, shops and restaurants have stopped to stop the disease from spreading, and the panic that has spread to financial markets has spread.

The CoreWeave team didn't hesitate when someone came up with the idea of ​​using GPU computing power for new crown virus research.

Venturo said they had the test system up and running in "minutes". Since then, the project has grown like a snowball. CoreWeave contributed more than half of the computing power to Folding @ home's new crown virus research.

"We never thought, 'Should I do this?', Everything happens naturally. We are excited about the help we can give."

Folding @ home is a decentralized project similar to Bitcoin. Folding @ home is not a single research company using a single mainframe computer to conduct research, but collects the computing power of anyone in the world who wants to participate in research-even just a laptop with a tiny computing power.

In this project, computing power was used to find useful information related to the new crown virus. Just like in Bitcoin mining, one user may find a "solution" and distribute this information to others.

Venturo says:

"Their protein simulator is trying to find a potential solution to whether existing (US Food and Drug Administration) approved drugs or other known formulas can help suppress or treat the virus."

Folding @ home explained in the article that the virus contains proteins "that are used to suppress our immune system and reproduce itself. In order to deal with the new crown virus, we want to understand how these viral proteins work and how we design treatments to stop they."

Simulating these proteins and then observing them from different angles helps scientists better understand them and potentially find an antidote. Computers can quickly transform these variables to speed up the process.

Folding @ home can use more computing power. Venturo is calling on other GPU miners to join.

Even if no one is calling, other cryptocurrency miners are already acting alone. Last week, Tulip.tools founder Johann Tanzer called on Tezos bakers (equivalent to miners) to send 15 XTZ to the main contributor of Folding @ home, which is worth about $ 25 as of press time.

What surprised Tanzer was the popularity of the plan. Although their contribution may not be as great as CoreWeave, the 20 Tezos miners are now contributing their power. Tezos users have also started donating, which has increased to about $ 600.

But not all miners can participate. Venturo said that while GPUs are flexible, ASICs have more limitations. Although ASICs are more powerful than GPUs, they actually have only one purpose: mining cryptocurrencies. This is what Venturo sees as an advantage of Ethereum over Bitcoin, as GPU mining is still feasible, and the latter is now dominated by ASIC.

"This is a big advantage of the Ethereum mining ecosystem, which is the largest GPU computing resource on the planet. We can redeploy our hardware in minutes to help fight the global epidemic."

However, it is worth noting that Ethereum has witnessed the "invasion" of ASICs. In addition, as Ethereum is about to usher in a key upgrade, miners in the traditional sense may be "extinct."

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