If You Own a Computer You Can Help Find a Cure for Covid-19
Well, another few years have gone by since I last posted here. I put this up on Facebook and then remembered I actually had a blog, why not revive it with a re-post?
Lets Help Find a Cure
Most of us with children and/or grandchildren know from animated movies that an “autobot transformer” is a fictional being capable of transforming with kind of a folding motion into something powerful and useful. Turns out, our bodies contain billions of life forming molecules known as proteins that do exactly that! A good example is the protein known as hemoglobin which folds itself into one form to capture oxygen in the lungs and folds to a different shape to deposit the oxygen in your muscles. Who knew??? Transformers in your blood, tell your grandkids, they’ll love it.
Not all proteins help us. A virus consists of genetic code surrounded by a coat of protein. These proteins will fold themselves into shapes that make it possible for the virus to attach and break into our living cells. Once there, they force the cell to produce virus copies. Scientists are attempting to understand what vulnerability might be exposed in the virus by watching that protein folding process step by step. If they can find that vulnerable spot, next step is to design a drug that can exploit it and kill the virus. While watching this folding process in real life and real time is sometimes possible, it can be modeled on computers and therefore controlled on computers BUT doing so requires ENORMOUS computing power. We are talking supercomputer power….. the largest supercomputers we can find today make this possible. The problem, of course, is $$$$$. The solution? You. And no, you don’t have to reach for your wallet.
Click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
for an 8 minute video introduction to the topic.
Anyone reading this has access to a computer. That computer is rarely used to its full capacity. Using the right software it is possible to safely donate time on your computer to help work on this problem. Your computer, be it a Windows machine or a Mac, can run the modeling software “in the background” at the lowest priority on the machine. Any time you do anything else it just waits. Typical computer users use only a tiny fraction of the computers “brainpower” leaving lots of time to work on a protean folding model. I have been running one of these services, known as “FAH” or “Folding at Home” for some fifteen years trouble free. My desktop Mac runs 24 x 7 x 365 for this purpose. You don’t have to; you could just set it up to run when you are using the computer but really there isn’t much cost involved in running it all the time. FAH is concentrating right now most heavily on ways to disable the Corona virus as is the other grid computing service, Rosetta.
You can find the software to download for “Folding at Home” by clicking https://foldingathome.org/
If you decide to support Rosetta you should know that Rosetta is one of several distributed computing projects supported by the "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing" otherwise known as BOINC. You will be downloading the software necessary to communicate via BOINC and then choosing "Rosetta" as the project you want to support.
You can find a video showing how to do that on a Windows machine by clicking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJfRtRQ5SBA
You can find a video showing how to do that on a Mac OS machine by clicking https://www.google.com/search…
You can find a written article describing “Folding at Home” by clicking https://www.hpcwire.com/…/foldinghome-turns-its-massive-cr…/
You can find an article describing “Rosetta@Home” by clicking https://www.hpcwire.com/…/rosettahome-rallies-a-legion-of-…/
If you have any doubts or questions drop me an email or add a comment question here and I will do my best to help. Lets fold em!!
Most of us with children and/or grandchildren know from animated movies that an “autobot transformer” is a fictional being capable of transforming with kind of a folding motion into something powerful and useful. Turns out, our bodies contain billions of life forming molecules known as proteins that do exactly that! A good example is the protein known as hemoglobin which folds itself into one form to capture oxygen in the lungs and folds to a different shape to deposit the oxygen in your muscles. Who knew??? Transformers in your blood, tell your grandkids, they’ll love it.
Not all proteins help us. A virus consists of genetic code surrounded by a coat of protein. These proteins will fold themselves into shapes that make it possible for the virus to attach and break into our living cells. Once there, they force the cell to produce virus copies. Scientists are attempting to understand what vulnerability might be exposed in the virus by watching that protein folding process step by step. If they can find that vulnerable spot, next step is to design a drug that can exploit it and kill the virus. While watching this folding process in real life and real time is sometimes possible, it can be modeled on computers and therefore controlled on computers BUT doing so requires ENORMOUS computing power. We are talking supercomputer power….. the largest supercomputers we can find today make this possible. The problem, of course, is $$$$$. The solution? You. And no, you don’t have to reach for your wallet.
Click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
for an 8 minute video introduction to the topic.
Anyone reading this has access to a computer. That computer is rarely used to its full capacity. Using the right software it is possible to safely donate time on your computer to help work on this problem. Your computer, be it a Windows machine or a Mac, can run the modeling software “in the background” at the lowest priority on the machine. Any time you do anything else it just waits. Typical computer users use only a tiny fraction of the computers “brainpower” leaving lots of time to work on a protean folding model. I have been running one of these services, known as “FAH” or “Folding at Home” for some fifteen years trouble free. My desktop Mac runs 24 x 7 x 365 for this purpose. You don’t have to; you could just set it up to run when you are using the computer but really there isn’t much cost involved in running it all the time. FAH is concentrating right now most heavily on ways to disable the Corona virus as is the other grid computing service, Rosetta.
You can find the software to download for “Folding at Home” by clicking https://foldingathome.org/
If you decide to support Rosetta you should know that Rosetta is one of several distributed computing projects supported by the "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing" otherwise known as BOINC. You will be downloading the software necessary to communicate via BOINC and then choosing "Rosetta" as the project you want to support.
You can find a video showing how to do that on a Windows machine by clicking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJfRtRQ5SBA
You can find a video showing how to do that on a Mac OS machine by clicking https://www.google.com/search…
You can find a written article describing “Folding at Home” by clicking https://www.hpcwire.com/…/foldinghome-turns-its-massive-cr…/
You can find an article describing “Rosetta@Home” by clicking https://www.hpcwire.com/…/rosettahome-rallies-a-legion-of-…/
If you have any doubts or questions drop me an email or add a comment question here and I will do my best to help. Lets fold em!!
