March 28, 2024

Novoda Software

Software Guides and Reviews

How to Use Your Mac to Help the Fight Against Coronavirus

Folding@home is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics.

In addition to cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s, Folding@home has announced that it is tackling a disease that has been dominating the headlines: COVID-19.

The project is joining researchers around the world who are working to better understand the Coronavirus to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies.

By downloading Folding@Home on your Mac, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers are working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for COVID-19 that could aid in the design of new therapies.


The following steps show yohttps://www.novodasoftware.com/u how to get started with the Mac app. Before you install the Folding@home client, be aware that it can consume a lot of CPU cycles, so depending on what you use your Mac for, you may be better off running it only during times when your Mac is otherwise idle.

  1. Open a browser tab and visit https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/.
  2. Click on fah-installer_7.5.1_x86_64.mpkg.zip link to download the Folding@Home installer.
    fold@home

You can view a visual representation of the molecules your Mac is analyzing in real time by clicking the Viewer button. You can also access the web client at https://client.foldingathome.org for a better visual rendering.


Since this is a power-hungry endeavor, the Folding@home client will automatically pause whenever your Mac laptop switches to battery power. You can control this setting in Configure -> Advanced -> Power.