The DOST-ASTI’s COARE Facility Helps in the Fight Against the COVID-19 through Folding@Home Initiatives

19 Mar 2020 6:00 PM

Folding@Home is an R&D project dedicated to help combat worldwide diseases through pioneering research pursuits carried out through distributed computing.

The rising number of confirmed cases and the prevalence of deaths caused by the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has been an alarming dilemma to most countries around the globe. In the time of this highly-contagious pandemic, the Computing and Archiving Research Environment (COARE) of the Department of Science and Technology—Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) is exerting efforts to help in the crucial battle against the virus. The COARE is a high-performance computing, data archiving, and science cloud facility that runs high-level commands, analyzes large sets of data, and processes intensive simulations. Right now, the facility is assisting the academia and the government in advancing global health research—including finding revolutionary cures for the COVID-19.

The COARE facility of the DOST-ASTI is helping in the fight against COVID-19.

On 17 March 2020, the COARE facility of the DOST-ASTI has volunteered to allocate a portion of its high-performance computing resources to the current COVID-19 research of Folding@Home. Folding@Home is an R&D project dedicated to help combat worldwide diseases through pioneering research pursuits carried out through distributed computing. The said R&D project was founded by the Pande Lab, a scientific laboratory that is part of the Department of Chemistry and Structural Biology in the Stanford University and the Stanford Medical Center. By installing and setting up Folding@Home, people all around the globe could volunteer the idle resources of their personal computers and help capacitate the research operations of the project.

The system administrators of the Computing and Archiving Research Environment.

The COARE team, led by its technical head Christian O. Matira, began the Folding@Home initiative by installing and setting up a folding node for the COVID-19 research. Through this delegated node, Folding@Home can run simulations by utilizing a portion of the COARE's CPU and GPU resources. Since the COARE has higher computational power and speed in comparison to regular personal computers, the said environment has a maximized potential in helping Folding@Home accomplish their research pursuits on computational drug design, protein folding, molecular dynamics, and other COVID-19-related computer simulations.

The COARE team is helping out Folding@Home through the allocation of the COARE's CPU and GPU resources.

Relatively, this voluntary initiative in supporting Folding@Home in the fight against COVID-19 is aligned with the goal of the COARE in exploring the viability of federating High-Performance Computing in the local and international landscapes. The current global efforts to contain such a serious pandemic is an opportune time to collaborate further with experts on various interdisciplinary fields of science and help enable researchers all around the world to unite their data—not just to advance research—but to find substantial breakthroughs for the ailing world.


You too can help! Visit Folding@Home to know how. For further inquiries about the Computing and Archiving Research Environment, visit the COARE Wiki or the COARE Facebook account. Also, if you would like to replicate the Folding@Home setup of COARE, send us an email at gridops@asti.dost.gov.ph.


 

 

About the Computing and Archiving Research Environment (COARE)

The Computing and Archiving Research Environment (COARE) is one of the services offered by the Department of Science and Technology’s Advanced Science and Technology (DOST-ASTI) that fosters collaboration among institutions by enabling multiple data integration between ASTI-initiated projects and other collaborative projects with other agencies that have high requirements for data storage and high-performance computing.