The largest particle physics laboratory in the world, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is joining the computing fight against COVID-19. CERN, which is the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is contributing computing resources to Folding@home: the massive, crowdsourced network of volunteer computers that turned its eye toward COVID-19 months ago.
The Folding@home software, which was created by Dr. Vijay Pande’s lab at Stanford University, can be run on desktop computers, allowing users to donate their computer’s resources to researchers working with the Folding@home team. In February, Greg Bowman, director of Folding@home, issued a call to action asking for more volunteers to help the researchers understand the moving parts of the coronavirus’ notorious “spike” protein. The resulting data from this research can then be leveraged by other research teams to find ways to disable the critical protein in its various forms.
Since that call to action, millions of computers have contributed to Folding@home’s work, a staggering increase over its numbers prior to the pandemic. Two weeks ago, Folding@home estimated its aggregate computing power at 2.4 exaflops.
Now, CERN is adding some of its considerable computing power to those numbers. The organization is contributing “about 10,000” cores from its main datacenter. “The contribution from the CERN datacenter comes from machines that were due to be retired,” explained Jan van Eldik, who leads resource provisioning within CERN’s Compute and Monitoring Group. “We have quickly developed a procedure to start virtual machines running Folding@home on CERN’s OpenStack cloud using these resources.”
Still, the datacenter does not comprise the bulk of CERN’s contribution: resources from LHC computing sites are driving almost twice as many work units through Folding@home. “With the collaboration of the LHC experiments, we have shared similar ‘recipes’ to maximise the contribution of available nodes to Folding@home with computing sites across the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid [WLCG],” said Simone Campana, WLCG project leader.
In total, CERN is now the 27th biggest contributor to Folding@home, up from 87th just ten days ago – and CERN isn’t stopping there. “Here at CERN, we have also offered to provide support for the server infrastructure of Folding@home, if needed,” said Ian Bird, who served as WLCG project leader until January 2020.
To run Folding@home on your own home computer, follow this link, install the software, and when selecting how to target your computational contribution, choose “Any Disease.”