The pandemic is going on for quite some time, social distancing is the new normal. At the beginning of Covid-19, we at Mnemonic decided that we want to help in some way.
Our medical experience is quite outdated and you do not become a virologist overnight.
Mnemonic is in the lucky position, that we have built our own
deep learning hardware when we started out and we figured pretty fast, that this hardware can be used to do calculations that are of medical importance on GPUs too.
So we decided to donate our computation 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 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 the research of F@H, even your office computer can make an impact when you are done working for the day.