Crowdsourced virtual supercomputer revs up virus research

Gamers, bitcoin "miners" and companies large and small have teamed up for an unprecedented data-crunching effort that aims to harness idle computing power to accelerate research for a coronavirus treatment. The project led by computational biologists has effectively created the world's most powerful supercomputer that can handle trillions of calculations needed to understand the structure of the virus. More than 400,000 users downloaded the application in the past two weeks from "Folding@Home," according to director Greg Bowman, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis, where the project is based. The "distributed computing" effort ties together thousands of devices to create a virtual supercomputer. The project originally launched at Stanford University 20 years ago was designed to use crowdsourced computing power for simulations to better understand diseases, especially "protein folding" anomalies that can make pathogens deadly. "The

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