Fold For Covid - Enlisting an Army of Raspberry Pi's to Fold Protein and Crunch Data

Virtually Maker Faire 2020

May 22nd-23rd

At Balena, we are experts in IoT Fleet Management, and all things containers on Raspberry Pi's and other single board computers. After one of our team members helped to port the Rosetta@Home protein folding project to Arm processors, we then created a ready-made Operating System (SD Card image) for the Raspberry Pi, Nvidia Jetson Nano, and other similar types of single board computers that contains an OS, the Rosetta project, and a small GUI, completely pre-configured and ready to crunch data. This allows users to very easily join the fight and provide protein folding compute power for scientists and researchers at the Baker Lab, which is based at the University of Washington. Doctors and scientists there are looking for proteins that bind to the "spike" protein on a coronavirus molecule, and the additional computation power provided by thousands of new devices lets them look for potential results quicker.

The image file, the project details, and a map of all the connected devices, can be found at: http://foldforcovid.io/

Thus, we will show participants how to download the ready-made image, and have their Raspberry Pi #JoinTheFold.