Kubernetes operators, help research Coronavirus!
tldr: Donate your idle Kubernetes resources to SARS-COV-2 research.
We are at a point in time where the Corona virus affects us all. And if you are an engineer like me, you have probably thought about ways to help combat the pandemic that is putting our world on edge.
Folding@Home
Since I am no doctor and do not have the capacity to help in this regard, my mind automatically goes to technical options. Some days ago, I read the following blog post from the team at Folding@Home: https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/
For those that are new to the Folding@Home project: Folding@home is a project focused on disease research. They use compute resources provided by the community to do calculations to aid in this research. The Folding@Home team is currently redirecting their general compute resources to SARS-COV-2 (Coronavirus) research projects.
Donating my idle Kubernetes resources
Turns out, I was already working on a Folding@Home deployment in my hobby Kubernetes cluster at home to donate some of my idle compute resources. It felt natural for me to take my idea from this private project and share my efforts so others can donate their idle Kubernetes resources to this research project.
You can find the git repository here: https://github.com/dionborsboom/k8s-covid19
Donating your idle resources is really simple:
- Decide if and how many idle Kubernetes resources you have
- Deploy the Folding@Home deployment with:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dionborsboom/k8s-covid19/master/deployment.yaml - Upscale the Folding@Home deployment to the amount of resources you are willing to donate:
kubectl -n incentro-oss-fah scale --replicas=3 -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dionborsboom/k8s-covid19/master/deployment.yaml
The current deployment manifest has Incentro (The company I work for) user and kubernetes-community team defined. Not familiar with Folding@Home and want to get started fast? Keep the defaults. Are you familiar with Folding@Home and want to change your team? Clone the repository and adjust as you see fit.
Other ways to help
Do you have a Kubernetes cluster with GPUs? Check out this awesome project from CoreWeave.
If you have no idle Kubernetes resources, but still want to help by donating your laptop or computer resources, get started here.
Do you have a gaming rig with a dedicated GPU? Check out this article.
The future
At Incentro we discussed starting an open source project that automatically donates idle Kubernetes resources to research projects. The goal of this open source project would be to build an operator that automatically donates a percentage of idle Kubernetes resources to projects like folding@home, seti@home or any other shared resource research projects. I feel the current situation confirms the usefulness of such a project.
For now, this project is more like a quick hack to get the cpu cycles going.
Lets help where we can!
