Like many, when I heard about Folding@HOME and how I could contribute to the fight against COVID, I put my hardware to work. Now that’s it has been a while, what effect did those projects ultimately have on the outcome? Did it actually help with the creation of vaccines, or was it effectively just a massive waste of energy?
Ultimately, what distributed computing projects provide is processing of data to facilitate scientific research. Most projects publicize scientific papers that make use of their data, like this blog post and the paper linked therein. In terms of post-mortem, that’s difficult to have while COVID is still an ongoing field of research.
While it has nothing to do with biology, Milkyway@Home recently announced that one of their projects would be shutting down because all goals had been achieved. They hope to publish a scientific paper later this year.