The Simmers Without Borders initiative aiding in the fight for a COVID-19 cure has been going for 10 days and in which time the collective has broken 25,000 work units, the organisers have revealed.

One of the group's leaders, Magnus Axholt took to Facebook with a video update to reveal the news, just 10 days into their quest.

Despite having been founded by Navigraph employees, the Simmers Without Borders initiative is open to all, with Axholt - who heads Navigraph - saying that the company is not claiming ownership of the project.

Simmers Without Borders makes use of the Folding@home distributed computing software in order to support protein folding simulations necessary to find a vaccine for various illnesses, most recently the novel coronavirus or COVID-19. Simulations of this type help medical workers identify how the virus attaches to proteins in the body, enabling them to better optimise aspects of a vaccine.

A "work unit" is a small part of that protein simulation, that personal computers can run at home. It typically takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete one work unit depending on the system.

The initiative has already passed 25,000 of these work units, more than double the project's goal of 10,000. Axholt predicts the 30,000 work unit barrier will be broken later this weekend.

Over 1000 simmers and organisations are taking part in the project, with Axholt highlighting a few notable organisations in the list such as Fly Away Simulation and GEISTT, who both have server infrastructure with headroom to dedicate to the cause at the moment. Threshold is also contributing to the cause.

The Navigraph CEO makes it clear that it's not organisations carrying the cause, though, with the top three (co-incidentally the three with dedicated server hardware on the task) comprising only one fifth of that total work units delivered. He stresses that individual users do the bulk of the heavy lifting.

The way forward for Simmers Without Borders, Axholt says, is with more users. He urges all involved to share the initiative to as many people as possible in order to help find a vaccine for COVID-19.

To show your support, you can download the Folding@home client here - to set it up to work with Simmers Without Borders, see their "Contribute" page. We here at Threshold will see you on the leaderboard!