The Instance Lab was designed and built to help educate and simulate various information and cyber-security related challenges. However, due to the novel COVID-19 virus, company visits and workshops have become difficult to conduct. But, rather than having the Instance Lab’s computer equipment stand idle, some of it has been put to good use—by joining Folding@Home.
Figure 1: A picture of the Instance Lab.
Folding@Home, currently based at Washington University in St. Louis, is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics. The project consists of volunteers who aid researchers in performing otherwise computationally costly atomic-level simulations of protein dynamics—much like a crowdsourced supercomputer. When not being in use, Cynic has assigned some of its computing power provided by the Instance Lab to help simulate dynamics of COVID-19 proteins in the hunt for new therapeutic opportunities, and toward a potent, patent-free drug.
Figure 2: A screen shot showing the Instance Lab’s folding progress.
Together with over a million other volunteers, Cynic is helping the Folding@home distributed computing project. An effort that, by April 12 this year, managed to reach an impressive 2.43 exaflops in total computing power. Making it the world’s first exaflop computing system, and one of the world’s fastest computing systems.
Sources:
- https://foldingathome.org/
- https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/
- https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home