Years ago at one point I had maybe 200 cores of Sun Microsystems servers searching for gravity waves several days at a time through out the year as part of the “LIGO at home” project. Our Java release tests ran in waves and I could borrow the machines to use the troughs to crunch on this project.

Now there’s “Folding @ Home” that is for doing the very hard work of figuring out protein details or other life science computing, and apparently there is some work going on relevant to the virus pandemic. The link below is to an article about this and it contains a link for taking part in the last sentence. If this works the way the LIGO one did, the app automagically gets out of the way of you using your PC, such as running when the screen saver is active. I suspect it’s even more flexible now. So consider donating a bit of energy with your PCs to pitch in and make this go faster.

https://decrypt.co/23064/folding-at-home-now-has-400000-users-fighting-coronavirus

Direct link to Folding @ Home: https://foldingathome.org/