I Own a Part of the World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer
And it’s helping scientists understand COVID-19.
In baseball, a skilled pitcher draws upon an arsenal of varied pitches that are fast or slow, straight or shifting. Bartenders always know the perfect glass to complement a cold, hoppy beer. Guitarists know the precise chord to strike to get a crowd on its feet.
Well, this is how I justify the fact that I have three laptops.
- A MacBook Pro that I use to work on business school assignments, develop mobile app designs, join Zoom happy hours, and read articles about baseball.
- A Dell Latitude that can handle any video game like a dream.
- Ol’ reliable. A hand-me-down, battered-up workhorse that operates Microsoft Excel add-ins that run multi-variable regressions in seconds, but can’t find a way to play nice with macOS.
For now, however, their most important duty is to join the most powerful computational network in the world — Folding@home (1).
Measured by a statistic called “floating point operations per second” (FLOPS), which identifies how many computations a piece of hardware can perform per second (2), the Folding@home network is now the most powerful distributive computing network in the world. As of April 2019, the Folding@home network has over 1.5 exaFLOPS of computing power. By comparison, this is nearly twice the computational power of MilkyWay@home, a project that aims to generate “accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way” (3).
But what does that actually mean?
Think of the last time you crashed an Excel worksheet because you had a few too many VLOOKUPs or complex conditional formulas. Now imagine if you could take small chunks of those spreadsheets and run them simultaneously across thousands of computers. That’s close to what thousands of “citizen scientists” are doing right now to try to help the medical community understand and develop therapeutics for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Ebola, and now COVID-19.
Folding@home provides a piece of software that users download onto their personal computers. The software then identifies when the computer is not utilizing its central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU), signaling that it can begin building advanced simulations of proteins, replicating a process called protein folding.
Protein folding is the physical process by which our bodies assemble proteins. While proteins perform a number of necessary roles in the human body, others are actually quite harmful. Tau and beta-amyloid, for example, are two proteins that form abnormal brain deposits strongly linked to Alzheimer’s. Cerebrospinal fluid proteins, on the other hand, bathe and cushion the brain and spinal cord. Recent studies now suggest that changes in cerebrospinal protein fluid levels may be an indication of early stage Alzheimer’s (4).
Unfortunately, proteins are incredibly difficult to observe. Because of this, studies rely on the generation of simulated protein models. The challenge with simulated protein folding, however, is that the process requires immense computational power, and is therefore very expensive to perform.
Enter, Folding@home. By downloading the folding software, your computer can join the global effort and carry out these simulations for scientists whose efforts will literally save lives. Better yet, recruit your friends and create a team that will compete with others around the world to see whose computer systems can perform the most simulations, all without any effort other than downloading and installing the software.
Good luck, however. You will be competing against teams from Amazon Web Services, The Tech Report, Overclock.net, and nearly one million other users looking to find a way to help address this global healthcare crisis during our time of self isolation.
Game on.
Will Blake
