We’re Joining the Fight Against COVID-19
AI/ML, Enterprise Bare Metal in Business
The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought together many organizations to leverage their capabilities to help combat the disease.
That’s the idea behind Folding@home, a distributed computing project used specifically for simulating protein dynamics implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists, who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on everything from personal computers to high-performance computing platforms, such as NVIDIA DGX systems. Up until recently, Folding@home’s focus lay on such diseases as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s, but with the onslaught of COVID-19, its focus has broadened.
Today, in the mad, global push to find a cure for COVID-19, Folding@home is collaborating with other labs and groups to break the COVID code. Unsurprisingly, running data simulations of such magnitude requires vast amounts of compute power even with the load shared by scores of volunteer citizen scientists — and that’s where Cyxtera comes in. We’ve been donating GPU cycles on our NVIDIA DGX-2 systems in our Dallas-Fort Worth lab to assist in the hunt for a COVID-19 cure.
We have powerful tools at our disposal: NVIDIA DGX-2 – as one of the world's most powerful GPU compute platforms – is ideally suited for the most complex compute challenges such as the one we’re facing now in the race to find answers about COVID-19. The Folding@home Docker container from the NVIDIA NGC container registry has made it easy for us to deploy, run and contribute DGX-2 compute power to help specifically in the area of developing a cure for the virus. Insights from Cyxtera’s data crunching are helping scientists better understand COVID-19 and providing new opportunities for developing treatments. We’re proud to be in the top 1 percent of the entities that are supporting the project worldwide.
Winston Churchill had quite a lot to say about war and victory among other things, but the one that sticks with me is this: “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” It’s our sincere hope that what we are giving offers life and hope to the world.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
Share this Post