Folding@Home On Flux: Web3 Powering the Future of Medical Research
Flux is committed to Proof of Useful Work and its potential to solve real-life problems. By donating computing resources to Folding@Home, Flux continues to drive the future of medical research and a renewed hope for humanity.
Folding@home, a distributed computing project focused on protein folding, was developed by the Pande laboratory in 2001. Vijay Pande, an adjunct professor of Bioengineering, envisioned a future where atomically-detailed protein folding simulations could provide crucial insight into the dynamics of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Cancer.
However, there was one significant challenge with this approach;
Simulating complicated biomolecules like proteins requires immense computational power, which would be unattainable for any laboratory. However, Pande had a solution. Inspired by the success of the Napster file-sharing service, Pande Laboratory developed an algorithm that would break these protein folding problems into independent simulations that could be tackled by volunteers all across the world.
Even in the 2000s, the idea of a distributed computing project was not unfamiliar. For example, before Folding@home, SETI searched for signs of extraterrestrial life by sifting through radio signals, while GIMPS wanted to find (and ended up finding) new prime numbers. So, when Folding@Home launched, it achieved considerable success. The project had its big break with the Sony partnership in 2007, which made it possible to run simulations on the then-popular PS3 game console. This collaboration propelled Folding@home to become the first platform to break the petaflop barrier. However, the partnership with Sony ended in 2012, and Folding@home continued to work in the background.
…until 2020, when an unlikely event altered the course of human history.
Folding@home, Flux, and Covid
Four months after the first reported case, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. Folding@home again became the center of renewed interest as the world sought a clue to unravel the novel virus. Flux's ideology is rooted in the principles of Proof of Useful Work (PoUW). Therefore, amid the pandemic, the team began a competition challenging node operators, miners, or anyone with a GPU/spare computer to donate their computing power to fuel medical research into the virus.
Three years later, Flux infrastructure has soared extensively to more than 13,000 nodes on several continents. FluxCloud also continues to record remarkable breakthroughs in Web3, especially with the release of decentralized WordPress and the introduction of enterprise features on FluxOS. However, the vision of a sustainable ecosystem running on PoUW ideals continues to flourish.
Flux has partnered with the HES (Geneva, Switzerland) on AcademicOnFlux. This research project explores the contribution of idle resources to academic researchers’ machine learning projects via Proof of Useful Work. Earlier this year, Flux also announced deploying a web-based AI application for detecting disease conditions from X-rays and CT scans on its infrastructure.
Still committed to the betterment of humanity, the Flux team has sponsored the deployment of 5000 instances running the Folding@home application on its network to ensure more useful work can be done. The team also recently broke a hundred million points milestone on the project! This places Flux in the top 0.8% of all-time contributors to Folding@home and translates to massive computing power devoted to medical research.
But there is still more to be done…
We are powering the future of medical research, one node at a time. To join the FluxCloud Team in contributing to the good of humanity, launch a Folding@FluxCloud app from the Flux marketplace and start folding with the Flux team using your personal computer or mining rig (GPU/CPU): Team ID to use 262156. Here’s a full breakdown of all steps involved.
About Folding@Home
Folding@home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in various diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers and scientific researchers. Insights from these data are helping scientists to understand biology better and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics. (Official Website: https://foldingathome.org/)
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