Since the end of March, computers of the Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe (GridKa) and the HPC systems of KIT are supporting the distributed computing projects Folding∂Home and Rosetta∂home, for example, to improve the understanding of the proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In close cooperation with the Institute for Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) at KIT, the CPU resources of GridKa were integrated into the Cobald/Tardis system that is used otherwise to dynamically manage the opportunistic provision of resources for research in high-energy physics. Up to 10,000 logical CPU cores of GridKa are now made available for Covid-19 research.
The department Scientific Computing and Simulation (SCS) has recently put the new HPC system bwUniCluster 2.0+GFB-HPC into operation. Folding@Home could serve as a useful example for a so-called "burn-in" process and the opportunistic provision of resources that would otherwise be temporarily not used due to the regular scheduling mechanisms in an HPC system. In addition to the CPU resources, up to 132 energy-efficient NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators are included in the calculations.
The teams "KIT-ETP" with GridKa and "KIT-SCS" already occupy ranks among the first 1000 of the more than 250.000 teams of Folding@Home.
In the short term, these resources will also be made available to the WeNMR project. Via the HADDOCK portal operated there, individual research groups can now also use GridKa resources for calculations to combat Covid-19.
Contact SCS: Jennifer Schröter
Contact GridKa: Andreas Petzold