Protein Folding with Flood IO

A good cause to use your idling grids to support

What does Flood IO do with spare CPU from idle Grids? Fold protein of course!

Protein Folding

Proteins are the elementary machines inside every cell that we rely on to keep us alive and healthy. They assemble themselves by “folding.” When proteins misfold, there can be serious health consequences. If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses.

The study of protein folding helps scientists understand what happens when proteins don't fold and is an important part of disease research including BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease.

Folding is a very complex process and it's often challenging to study in the laboratory. To overcome this, Stanford University solved massive computational problems through distributed computing and their Folding@Home project. You can find out more about the project here.

How can I help?

The next time you launch a grid, look for the CPU Shared option to choose how much of your spare CPU capacity is shared for protein folding research.

You have the option to choose none, at least half, or all of your spare capacity. If you choose to share, whenever your grid is not running a flood test we will automatically launch an isolated docker container that will start crunching data. Whenever you queue a flood test that processing is paused until your grid is idle again.

It doesn't cost you anything extra, won't interfere with your results, and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that your spare grid computing power is helping to accelerate research ... Allowing scientists to complete simulations in a few months when it would otherwise take several years.

Thanks for helping and sharing your grids.

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