Helping scientific research @ Doctolib
A bit of context first
Two months ago, we had a dilemma here at Doctolib: a lot of our servers were wiped, those which we had previously used became unused and were idling.
We could not (and still can not) decommission them yet because our contract with our infrastructure provider for these servers goes until June 2020.
We’re not talking about Raspberry Pi kind of servers here but heavy-duty servers. Here is the distribution of machines per number of CPU cores:
Yes, we had a total of 1350 cores that were simply idling!
What we did after the realization
If you’re still reading, you probably know where this is going now:
We should mine some kind of coins!
I won’t tell you that we did not joke about it at first but once the laugh was over, we started looking for something meaningful we could do. Since the servers were already paid for the next 6 months, we could go absolutely wild with ideas for how to use them. During this time we discovered the Boinc platform which allows anyone to lend its computational capacity to help numerous scientific projects.
There are cryptography, climate, mathematics, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, … projects but when we saw that there were medical projects that we could get involved in, we had found a winner. Since Doctolib works closely with the medical world, it makes total sense for us to contribute to it. Hence our choice to contribute to the Rosetta project:
By running Rosetta@home on your computer when you’re not using it you will speed up and extend our efforts to design new proteins and to predict their 3-dimensional shapes. Proteins are the molecular machines and the building blocks of life.
If you want to know a bit more about the Rosetta project I highly recommend you watch the TED talk made by David Baker in early 2019.
We are now proud participants of proteins R&D and after about a month we are already in the top 3 (recent participants) which makes us even prouder.
You can help too!
Do you want to be on the cutting edge of science and participate too?
It is completely possible even on your own computer, there is no need for heavy-duty computers. Boinc (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) has made software available, the Boinc manager, which helps you contribute to projects without any technical knowledge.
You are literally a few clicks away from contributing, go for it!
What will happen once our servers will be decommissioned?
Yes, our servers will be decommissioned in June.
Does this mean that we’ll stop contributing? No.
Yes, the size of the cluster that we currently expose to the Rosetta project will shrink as we can not spend that much every month to be completely transparent.
However, we will continue to contribute to Rosetta or other scientific projects afterwards because as much as we like to contribute in open source projects, we now also like to participate in scientific projects (thanks again to the BOINC team who made this process so simple).
If you like to work in a company which has ethical values and actually takes time to contribute back, come apply at Doctolib to help us improve healthcare in both France and Germany.
If you want more technical news, follow our journey through our docto-tech-life newsletter.
