Assist With Coronavirus Research: Using Rosetta@home To Help Find A Cure

It is now possible to use your 64bit ODROID to assist with Coronavirus Research. Thanks to a new application update for Rosetta@home, made possible by the Arm development community. You will need at least 2GB of RAM and a 64-bit OS (either Linux or Android).

Getting started on Android

To get started on Android, simply download the BOINC app from the Google Play Store and choose Rosetta@home from the list of projects. Run the app and either create a new account or use an existing one if you have one. Then just wait for work units to arrive.

Getting started on Linux

To get started on linux, first be sure everything is up to date:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Then install the boinc client and the boinc text user interface:
$ sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinctui
Then run bonctui:
$ boinctui
Press ‘F9’ and navigate to “Projects”, select “Add Project” and choose “Rosetta@Home”. Choose an existing account or create a new one and wait for work units to arrive, then just let it run.

What it does

Rosetta@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness thousands and thousands of computers to run distributed computing jobs(large computing jobs broken down into smaller work units to be run on across many different processors) based on the known DNA sequence of the Coronavirus(as well as other viruses related to other diseases) “to predict the structure of proteins important to the disease as well as to produce new, stable mini-proteins to be used as potential therapeutics and diagnostics, like the one displayed above which is bound to part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”(https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13702)

Figure 1 - JHR vs Covid

These results make possible targeted and accelerated vaccine and anti-viral research.

Strength in numbers

At the end of March, there were nearly 100,000 hosts from over 140 countries enabling an estimated 1.26 petaflops of computing power. That’s true supercomputer performance, donated to researchers by thousands of individuals around the globe, to help address a global problem. A cause well worth the spare compute cycles of our ODROID SBCs.

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