bwLehrpool: Help for corona drug development

Due to the current circumstances, a large part of the existing pool computers are not being used. In order to utilize this potential for the benefit of the general public, the bwLehrpool team, at the suggestion of a physics student, is carrying out calculations for the folding@home project on currently idle pool computers. These are not overlapping with the "bwLehrpool Remote" offer.

project folding@home, screenshot COVID-19

In addition to the benefits for the general public via its involvement in the folding@home project (i.e. supplying computing power for calculations on the protein folding of the corona virus to help find adequate drug therapies) the bwLehrpool team was able to successfully carry out a series of tests:

the Docker integration from the ViCE project, which was completed last year, is ready for use and will be reused for the bwGPUL project, and
"distributed computing" (for trivial parallelizable problems) is possible with bwLehrpool tools even on a larger scale.

The computing power provided for folding@home in a short time (summarized in the student team under "RZ-Freiburg") generally points to an underestimated potential of the pool computers: with a few small scheduling add-ons, it would be possible to run normal pool room operation (or remote bwLehrpool) during the day and to perform distributed calculations for the institution's own purposes at night.

If you are interested in distributed computing in the frame of bwLehrpool, the bwLehrpool team will be happy to help you.

Note: A more detailed description can be found in the admin forum on the ILIAS platform for continuing education (topic "corona drugs and "distributed computing" under bwLehrpool").