Reading the title of this post might be a bit confusing, so let me start from the beginning. I was browsing Youtube this weekend when I saw ETAPRIME, who does Raspberry Pi and other SBC Computer projects, made a video with a similar title. I watched his video and learned about a program called BOINC, the Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. This program allows multiple computers to be given a distributed workload for solving complex problems, effectively acting as a supercomputer.

There are various projects that are run through the infrastructure, but one in particular, called Rosetta@home, is run by The Baker Lab at the University of Washing, which is dedicated to understanding the complex structure and function of proteins. They have turned their attention to SARS-COV2 virus and recently were given extra help to allow their software to run on ARM based computers.

I spent the weekend setting up my Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM to run uninterrupted on the Rosetta@home Project, since I wasn't currently using it for any personal projects. However after checking the available workload page, I noticed there was a lot more work available to be done by Intel based CPUs, so I also set up my PC to run BOINC and Rosetta@home overnight, as I wouldn't be using my laptop at night anyway. I'm happy to be contributing in any way I can while following stay at home orders!

You can view my total contributions at the link below. Moving forward in the next few days I will be setting up BOINC on my old laptop, as well as another SBC computer I have, an ODROID XU4, so that I can contribute as much as possible!

https://www.boincstats.com/stats/-1/user/detail/43a209fd451d84a19b724a29d3a6bc8f