RAPID: Folding@home and COVID-19

The SARS-CoV-2 virus uses numerous proteins to infect human cells, evade an immune response, and replicate itself. These proteins have moving parts that are essential to their function. Understanding the way the proteins move and change conformation will provide novel insights into viral biology and could potentially reveal new therapeutic opportunities. Researchers supported by this award are simulating the SARS-COV-2 proteins using the Folding@home distributed computer, which pools the computational resources of volunteer citizen scientists across the globe to run simulations on their personal computers. As a result of huge public interest and very productive interactions with major technology corporations, the Folding@home network now provides access to over 23 million CPU cores and 600,000 GPUs, making the network roughly 10-times more powerful than the world?s fastest traditional supercomputer. Support from this award will provide much needed upgrades to the cyberinfrastructure required to effectively harness this unprecedented computational resource and engage productively with the millions of people now participating in the effort to better understand SARS-COV-2. Results of the research effort will be published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at scientific meetings, and distributed broadly by social media and popular press.

Folding@home is one of the largest and most successful distributed computing projects in the world. Current research efforts on the SARS-COV-2 include a dynamic analysis of every viral protein and free energy perturbation modeling of more than 50,000 small molecule interactions to identify possible starting points for therapeutics. Searching for cryptic binding sites is a major focus of the effort and early results are promising. With support from this award, improvements in the Folding@home TCP/IP stack, work collection servers, and back-end analysis servers will be conducted to increase the utilization efficiency of distributed computing resources. The additional capacity will also enable support for more projects with basic biological research relevance. This RAPID award to Washington University in Saint Louis is made by the Division of Biological Infrastructure using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.