Today people have to stay at home because of COVID-19 virus epidemic. Thanks to technologies many people can work from home. I think this possibility is available only for about 20 years. People of certain professions fight virus directly: medical staff, scientists... There are some possibilities for all people to help them.
Distributed computing is used for tasks with lots of calculations. Thousands or millions computers are used to make calculations of one large task divided into small peaces. This method allows to solve problem faster than any supercomputer.
There are several distributed network with different tasks solving: Seti@home, Rosetta@home, Folding@home, etc. Folding@home is a project focused on disease research. Now they are also researching COVID-19 virus. More information can be found on their homepage.
Everybody who is willing to help donating their computer power, can download client for Windows, Mac or Linux and install it. This application will use computer power when user is not needing it, process has low priority so it will not disturb user's work. There are two options for calculations - use GPU or CPU. Usually GPU is much powerful than CPU because of greater cores count. But not all GPUs can be used - very old graphic processors can not work with CUDA technology.
I have decided to make calculations only using GPU because it is more productive and computer will remain much quite and cool.
Application connects to work server and downloads one piece of task - work unit. Usually it takes several hours to complete one work unit. For each completed work unit user receives some some amount of scores. Overall rank is calculated using this score. At first places are users which are using many computers, but you can help project even with one computer. Scores can be seen here.
Last few weeks active users count has increased. Of course this is because new corona virus spread across to world. People have opportunity to help win virus joining this project.
Another platform who has also declared to research virus is Rosetta@home. It uses another application named BOINC. This application is widely used also for other distributed networks. It is even available for smartphones on Google Play.
Regular computer users can help scientists to research dangerous diseases donating computer power. Of course electricity bills will be larger, but I think it's worth it!