Today, unsurprisingly, all our compute power is pointed squarely at COVID-19. But taking a step back, the broader impact of harnessing the compute power of hundreds of thousands of volunteers will be to continually make the world a safer, healthier place prepared to tackle major challenges. As a medicine and biology platform, our problem-solving scope is infinitely broad and widely applicable. It is our hope that the Folding@home community continues to builds strong collaborations with more partners like Pure Storage, enabling us to tackle more of the world’s major challenges — pandemics in their own right — while providing people with the unique opportunity to make a difference every single day.
Folding@home was connected to Pure Storage through one of the company’s employees, who is part of the Folding@home community. Through its Pure Good Foundation Pure donated a Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) FlashBlade system, which immediately allowed us to add more storage capacity without paying for unneeded processing power.
“By greatly expanding our storage capacity and separating it from compute, we’re able to focus our compute resources on making sense of the massive amounts of data coming in from Folding@home,” said Greg Bowman, Director, Folding@home. “Importantly, the FlashBlade will allow us to operate on data from Folding@home in place. It’s as if FlashBlade was purpose built for our mission.”
“High performance on large numbers of small files represents a true sweet spot for FlashBlade,” said Matt Burr, General Manager, FlashBlade. “For Folding@home, the challenge is countless tiny files returning from personal computers that need to be reassembled. Redistributed workloads send small bits of data back to a core compute cluster, grid, or cloud, which requires a high performance solution for reassembly and ultimately processing. This is exactly what FlashBlade was architected to do.”
For more information about our collaboration listen to this recorded webinar with Pure Storage, Leveraging the Power of Many to Solve COVID-19 or read the press release from Pure.
Learn more about the science Folding@home is pursuing at foldingathome.org
We are looking for more partners like Pure to help support our work, especially by providing funds to help expand our developer team. If you are interested in helping accelerate scientific progress, please contact Anton Thynell.