Combat Coronavirus By Folding@Home — Part II

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Headstorm

4 min readJun 2, 2020

This is the second article of series pertaining to Folding@Home (FAH) and the Coronavirus. Part II focuses on the computational power of FAH, and giving more detailed insights on how the computational power is used.

In the first article of this series, I introduced FAH, what it does, and how you can participate in it. To quickly recap: “Folding@Home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases”. Joining the Folding community is simple. For detailed instructions, please refer to my first article, or simply go to FAH’s website.

How Does FAH Use Computational Power?

As mentioned in Part I of this article FAH uses computational power to create simulation of protein structures and their interactions with one another. Examining the various structures of proteins can help scientists design therapeutics to stop the virus. Why is it important to learn about such interactions? And how does FAH accomplish this goal? As it turns out, protein folding is an extremely complicated process. Simulating all potential variations takes a lot of computational power. Therefore, FAH splits up the computer modeling process into smaller tasks which then get distributed to computers around the world¹. In addition, FAH uses these simulations to study which FDA-approved drug may be the most effective in killing Coronavirus². Below is a more scientific description about work of FAH from Science Alert:

The primary job of Folding@home is to model how proteins behave in the body, underpinning so many core biological functions.
Those functions include virus infection: the Folding@home team is looking in particular at how the so-called 'spike' of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which is actually made up of three proteins) attaches itself to human cells and infects the human body.
Those three proteins the spike uses to grab hold of the ACE2 human cells look so much like the mouth of the Demogorgon from Stranger Things, the research team has even nicknamed it after the monster.
This is the key way that the new coronavirus can penetrate tissue in the human body, and so blocking it could be crucial to future therapies and treatments. If we can understand more about how the spike proteins work – which is what the computer simulations powered by Folding@home are doing – then we can better design the drugs to stop them.

How Much Computational Power is Available For FAH?

The recent developments with COVID-19 resulted in a surge in the number of users of FAH. In a recent interview with the director of FAH, biochemist Greg Bowman mentioned that approximately 700,000 new FAH users joined in the community in the first few months of 2020. Before this surge, the average number of users hovered around 30,000. This donated computational power reached record numbers. The FAH network reached a historic 2.4exaFLOPs (more details on that later), which surpasses the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined³. While so much power seems excessive, the reality is that it is actually quite needed. Protein folding simulations require enormous amounts of computational power. Greg Bowman recently wrote in FAH’s blog:

“If you tried to simulate the opening of the spike on your home computer, you’d be lucky to see even part of the process within the next 100 years”

FLOPs

As mentioned above, the combined computational power of FAH users reached an astounding 2.4exaFlOPs, but what does that mean? FLOPs is short for floating-point operations per second. It is a common way to rate speed of microprocessors. Floating-point operations require more time and power to compute than regular integer operations. Modern microprocessors include a floating-point unit (FPU). The FPU is responsible for executing floating-point operations. FLOPs measure the speed of the FPU⁴.

Therefore, 2.4 exaFLOPs translates to 2.4 quintillion ( 10¹⁸ ) floating-point operations per second, or 1000 petaFLOPs. To put these numbers in perspective the Xbox One X has 12 teraFLOPs of processing power. An exaFLOP consists of one million teraflops¹.

“To match what a one exaFLOP computer system can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years.”

Takeaway

Whether you are in the medical field or not, you can contribute to fighting diseases. By yourself, you might not be able to provide the necessary resources, but our combined efforts can surmount incredible obstacles. FAH is a simple and extremely powerful way to contribute.

Combat Coronavirus By Folding@Home — Part II

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Written by Faisal Alnahhas