Folding@Home

ASU Research Computing, in collaboration with our tri-university partner institutions, has joined efforts to understand COVID-19 through Folding@Home (FAH), a distributed computing molecular dynamics project with hopes to significantly contribute to drug discovery for COVID-19 by dynamically simulating COVID-19 viral proteins. To assist with this collaborative effort ASU Research Computing is utilizing accelerated computing devices to perform these protein modeling computations during the brief idle periods between regular computing jobs.

By running these computations only during idle time, Research Computing is able to contribute to this COVID modeling effort without impacting ASU's everyday computational research. These jobs are submitted in the lowest priority QOS queue and will be automatically cancelled to make resources available to any user-submitted jobs. Folding@Home jobs should never impact user jobs or research.

Track our progress: https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=239945

Join the Fight

Interested in joining our initiative by folding on your own computer? Follow the installation instructions here, then add the following field to your config.xml file <team v='239945'/>. Contact us at rtshelp@asu.edu for our passkey!

Are you an institution wanting to join our initiative?

We are happy to collaborate, so feel free to reach out. Below are simplified runtime instructions that were used for our CentOS 7 cluster:

## In a build directory download the appropriate RPM
wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahclient/centos-6.7-64bit/v7.6/fahclient-7.6.13-1.x86_64.rpm
## Expand the rpm
rpm2cpio fahclient-7.6.13-1.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idv
## Install the rpm to your $TARGET directory
cp -vr usr/bin $TARGET # creates $TARGET directory, copies over FAHclient 
# and FAHCoreWrapper binaries
cp usr/share/doc/fahclient/* $TARGET # copies over sample-config.xml and various docs

A build and install script for Folding@Home version 7.6.13 is also available on github. The github repository also contains an example modulefile and some examples for running Folding@Home with the Slurm scheduler.