The Digital Research Team are supporting the global fight against COVID-19 by utilising compute capacity on Maxwell, our HPC (High Performance Computer Cluster) to support the Folding@home (FAH) project.
What is the FAH project?
FAH is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics.1 It uses spare computing capacity in volunteers’ personal computers to create a global supercomputer to which researchers can submit discrete tasks.
How will FAH help the fight against COVID-19?
Understanding SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will play a fundamental part in helping design drugs to combat it. And computation plays a significant role in drug design, enabling researchers to design therapeutics.
How is the HPC helping?
Although specifically designed to run on home computers, we – and our commercial partners OCF – have packaged the FAH software to run on our HPC and have shared it with other universities. The University of Hull, the University of East Anglia, and Plymouth Marine Lab are also contributing to this project, adding significant computational power to help address the COVID-19 problem.
How can I help?
You too can contribute to the FAH project. By donating the unused computational resources on your personal computer, you can help tackle the COVID-19 problem from home.
To find out more about the project, and download Folding@home, visit https://foldingathome.org/covid19/.
If you do join, please feel free to affiliate yourself to the University of Aberdeen Team (Team ID: 248222).
Author: Digital Research Team, DDIS
1The FAH project was started at Stanford University and is currently being run out of Washington University by Greg Bowman.