Folding at Home and Rosetta at Home are both distributed computing platforms organized and put together to provide researchers with an alternative high-compute platform. These services take advantage of crowdsourcing and dormant computing power ranging from full server environments to last decade’s netbooks.
Both services work to compute the complex and diverse ways that proteins assemble themselves by folding. Proteins assume a particular shape in order to perform their various functions and interface with each other. By understanding more about the ways that proteins fold, the medical community can better understand the cause and effect of different proteins and develop better drugs and treatments for all kinds of diseases.
This is where raw compute power comes in. Since proteins are so complex and can fold in a potentially baffling amount of ways, possible folds need to be simulated in order to construct accurate models. This requires a lot of processing power and is commonly run on research supercomputers at University’s and Labs around the world. However, the cost of these supercomputers is high and the demand on their time is constant and commonly insufficient for the queue of work that needs to be run.
Folding at Home, Rosetta, and many other similar projects have sprung up to help alleviate this constraint by asking people all over the world to donate their computers processing time to help perform these tasks at scale. It’s kind of like a DDoS attack against disease.
Folding at Home
Folding at Home is based out of the St. Louis School of Medicine at Washington University and is backed by labs and organizations from around the world.
Main Website: Folding@Home
Twitter: Folding@Home
Twitch Steam: Folding@Home
Rosetta at Home
Rosetta at Home is based out of the Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington and is distributed by the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing Platform (BOINC) which hosts a number of other similar projects.
Main Website: Rosetta@Home
Twitter: Rosetta@Home
Reaction to COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, both of these platforms have exploded both in user base and computing power, with Folding at Home surpassing the exaflop barrier in a matter of weeks.
In fact, the initial reaction was so large that both of these services initially had trouble providing enough work to the community and receiving the results from this work, both relatively good problems to have. The teams behind Folding at Home and Rosetta, along with a numerous host of partners and donors, got to work and solved problem after problem at break-neck speed as they strove to take advantage of the new windfall of support and raw computing power.
Beginning in early March of 2020, Folding at Home began to experience a tremendous spike in its user base. In February of 2020 Folding at Home had an active user base of ~30,000. By the end of March and beginning of April they had blown past the 400,000 user mark. Much of this initial growth was spurred on by the tech enthusiast community lead by groups like Nvidia, EVGA, and Linus Tech Tips.
This exponential increase in computing power put both these teams on their toes and there were a few days around March 20th when many machines were left on idle as infrastructure was quickly deployed. Since then both services have been incredibly busy partnering and working with outside groups to utilize what have effectively become some of the most powerful compute platforms in the world.
Source: Twitter
On March 25th, 2020 Folding at Home broke the exaFlop barrier!
Source: Twitter
Source: Twitter
On March 30th, 2020 Folding at Home broke the 1 Million device mark!
Source: Twitter
In these curious times, truly remarkable people have stepped up to accomplish extraordinary things.
My Cluster
I’ve had the opportunity to participate in these events first hand as a Folding at Home and Rosetta at Home donor. I currently run two desktop towers and an older Mac Mini full time contributing to these two platforms. I have all of these devices setup via SSH and VNC so that I can check in every once in a while to see how they’re doing. It has also served as a great way to heat the room :)
Source: The Webb Cluster
Get Involved
Get involved with Folding@Home or Rosetta@Home by following the links below: