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These projects are cool and do contribute to our understanding, but they are not part of the critical path of fighting this pandemic.

The vaccine(s) are already in phase one clinical trial testing, as are some important anti-viral treatments which are in phase three clinical trial testing.

There is no potential output from this folding project that can accelerate those timelines.

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Sure, I'm aware that this is fundamental research (likely not on actual protein folding, but haven't looked at the details), which will probably not have short-term outcomes, not on the timescales required for a 1st gen vaccine (perhaps not even 2nd gen).

That does however not take away from my main point, if anything it is in support of what I was trying to emphasize: such computational research is better suited for a compute cluster.

I guess my point was that corporations devoting large sets of their compute clusters to partake in activity that has no potential to help the current pandemic, isn't going to make much business sense.

I agree.

In fact, donating in other ways, e.g. giving free programming, HPC etc. education to more researchers can have a higher impact on the long run.

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