Covid-19, Mnemonic AI & Folding@Home

The pandemic has been going on for quite some time, and social distancing is the new normal. At the beginning of COVID-19, we at Mnemonic decided that we wanted to help in some way.
Our medical experience is somewhat outdated, and becoming a virologist is not something that happens overnight.

Mnemonic is in a fortunate position, having built our own deep learning hardware from the outset. We quickly realized that this hardware can also be used to perform calculations of medical importance on GPUs.

So we decided to donate our computational capabilities to a project called Folding at Home. For people who are not familiar with the concept of distributed computing, like SETI or Rosetta at home, a short explanation:
You install a small software and tell it how much of your (idle) computation resources it can use. After that, you receive smaller parts of computation-heavy tasks, in the case of folding at home, simulation of proteins, or specifically viruses, i.e., COVID-19.

Facing the pandemic a lot of cool people donated their computation time (looking at you gamers) to the project originally developed at Stanford. By April, the distributed computing system reached 2.43 exaflops.
As of today, the work of folding at home has resulted in 224 papers.

We hope that the donation of one of our research units contributed, at last, a little bit to COVID-19, Alzheimer's, cancer, ... research. We will keep our system dedicated to F@H for the foreseeable future and hope others will do the same.

If you want to monitor our contribution, feel free to check out our team page (F@h has a cool gamification approach if you are into this kind of motivation)

Of course, you do not need a high-end deep learning or dedicated gaming computer to help with the research of F@H, even your office computer can make an impact when you are done working for the day.