In these exceptional times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the truly exceptional contributions to society come from people and organizations on the frontline, in healthcare and other vital professions. But following the "call to arms" (from various sides) to AI organizations and data scientists to try and contribute, and in particular the appeal from NVIDIA, we decided to at least make a minor contribution in the fight against COVID-19.
We have joined Folding@Home and are donating some of our private cloud GPU computer power to that great project running protein folding simulations on a worldwide distributed computer network. Previously, the project made contributions to understanding and combating the Ebola virus, and the hope is that similarly COVID-19 can be tackled in this way.
To our colleagues and competitors in the AI space: join too! But note that installation on linux machines equipped with NVIDIA GPUs and drivers can be finicky. Check out this article as well as this one for helpful tips that worked for us.
Update April 15, 2020: The Folding@Home combined computing power now amounts to a record breaking 2.4 exaflops. This is more powerful than all the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined!