Protect Environmental cares about the health and safety of its community and has recently signed up to host a node to support the efforts of a parallel computing Coronavirus research initiative.
Rosetta@Home is a distributed computing project that engages community involvement by utilizing volunteered computer space to speed up and extend research being conducted on existing biomolecules, including coronavirus proteins, as well as designing new proteins. Rosetta’s Computing for COVID project supports the research necessary to create medicines and vaccines as potential cures for the coronavirus.
How it works: a computing grid uses distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. These computers work together by assigning certain tasks and projects to millions of different nodes hosted on thousands of different servers.
“In a project of this scale, there are millions of large servers hosting thousands of nodes each. We are hosting just a tiny node in a huge effort. This is the largest amount of multi-organizational computing effort that has ever been unleashed to solve a problem in history, and we are excited to be even a small part of it.”
– Kyle Hoylman, Managing Partner of Protect Environmental
The Institute for Protein Design: University of Washington’s Baker Lab actively utilizes volunteered nodes for seven key projects, which are believed to have an immediate impact on containing COVID-19. You can read more about these projects individually by following the links below or by visiting the Institute for Protein Design’s website: Coronavirus Response.
- Antiviral and anti-inflammatory proteins
- Nanoparticle vaccines
- Protease Inhibitors
- Serological diagnostics
- Screening existing drugs
- Over 8,000 FDA-approved drugs are being screened in silico (conducted or produced by means of computer modeling or simulation) for binding structures from COVID-19 proteins
- Nanoparticles to treat inflammation
- Modeling the viral proteome
- Citizen science
- Empowering everyone to join the fight against COVID-19 through Foldit and Rosetta@Home parallel computing efforts
Protect Environmental supports the University of Washington’s Baker Lab and the research they are doing to fight the coronavirus. By participating in the Computing for COVID project, we believe we are doing a small part to help our community press on toward discovering an effective solution.
To learn how you can be a part of the Rosetta@Home project Computing for COVID, visit their websites, consider giving online toward their research efforts, and share about the work they are doing. When we all band together, each contributing even in a small way, the impossible can be made possible.
