RAPID: Folding@home and COVID-19

SARS-CoV-2病毒使用多种蛋白质感染人体细胞，逃避免疫反应，并复制自身。这些蛋白质具有对其功能至关重要的移动部分。 了解蛋白质移动和改变构象的方式将为病毒生物学提供新的见解，并可能揭示新的治疗机会。该奖项支持的研究人员正在使用Folding@home分布式计算机模拟SARS-COV-2蛋白质，该计算机汇集了地球仪各地志愿公民科学家的计算资源，在他们的个人计算机上运行模拟。 由于巨大的公众利益和与主要技术公司非常富有成效的互动，Folding@home网络现在可以访问超过2300万个CPU内核和60万个GPU，使该网络比世界上最快的传统超级计算机强大约10倍。该奖项的支持将为有效利用这一前所未有的计算资源所需的网络基础设施提供急需的升级，并与目前参与更好地了解SARS-COV-2的数百万人进行富有成效的互动。 研究成果将发表在同行评审的期刊上，在科学会议上发表，并通过社交媒体和大众媒体广泛传播。Folding@home是世界上最大和最成功的分布式计算项目之一。 目前对SARS-COV-2的研究工作包括对每种病毒蛋白质的动态分析和对50，000多种小分子相互作用的自由能微扰建模，以确定治疗的可能起点。 寻找隐蔽的结合位点是这项工作的主要重点，早期的结果是有希望的。 在该奖项的支持下，将对Folding@home TCP/IP堆栈、工作收集服务器和后端分析服务器进行改进，以提高分布式计算资源的利用效率。 增加的能力还将使更多与基础生物研究相关的项目得到支持。 这个快速奖华盛顿大学在圣刘易斯是由生物基础设施部使用资金从冠状病毒援助，救济和经济安全（关怀）法案。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

The SARS-CoV-2 virus uses numerous proteins to infect human cells, evade an immune response, and replicate itself. These proteins have moving parts that are essential to their function. Understanding the way the proteins move and change conformation will provide novel insights into viral biology and could potentially reveal new therapeutic opportunities. Researchers supported by this award are simulating the SARS-COV-2 proteins using the Folding@home distributed computer, which pools the computational resources of volunteer citizen scientists across the globe to run simulations on their personal computers. As a result of huge public interest and very productive interactions with major technology corporations, the Folding@home network now provides access to over 23 million CPU cores and 600,000 GPUs, making the network roughly 10-times more powerful than the world’s fastest traditional supercomputer. Support from this award will provide much needed upgrades to the cyberinfrastructure required to effectively harness this unprecedented computational resource and engage productively with the millions of people now participating in the effort to better understand SARS-COV-2. Results of the research effort will be published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at scientific meetings, and distributed broadly by social media and popular press.Folding@home is one of the largest and most successful distributed computing projects in the world. Current research efforts on the SARS-COV-2 include a dynamic analysis of every viral protein and free energy perturbation modeling of more than 50,000 small molecule interactions to identify possible starting points for therapeutics. Searching for cryptic binding sites is a major focus of the effort and early results are promising. With support from this award, improvements in the Folding@home TCP/IP stack, work collection servers, and back-end analysis servers will be conducted to increase the utilization efficiency of distributed computing resources. The additional capacity will also enable support for more projects with basic biological research relevance. This RAPID award to Washington University in Saint Louis is made by the Division of Biological Infrastructure using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.