Saturday, October 12, 2024
Advertisements

ESI Joins the Fight Against COVID-19 with Folding@Home Computing Project

PARIS, France, Apr 17, 2020 – ESI Group, a world player in virtual prototyping software and services for industrials, is joining Folding@Home (FaH) project in the United States, making the computing power of its servers available to accelerate research on the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

Advertisements

 

esi_group

 

Launched 20 years ago at Stanford University, Folding@Home (FaH) is a distributed computing project for performing molecular dynamics simulations of protein dynamics. Its initial focus was on protein folding but has shifted to more biomedical problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, COVID-19, and Ebola.

Folding@Home uses computer simulation to predict the dynamics of diseases like COVID-19 and understand the proteins’ moving parts thanks to 3D modeling. Watching how the atoms in a protein related to the virus move relative to one another is important because it captures valuable information that is inaccessible by any other means.

This project runs on the unused computing power of computers, phones and formerly PS3s from thousands of thousands of volunteers, both individuals and corporates.

ESI Group joined in March 2020 the fight to defeat COVID-19, combining their high-performance CPU and Graphics computing power with the Folding@Home network which is now pushing out an impressive 470 PetaFLOPS of raw compute power. Contributing to this project has provided an amazing look at the power of collaboration since the Folding@Home overall computational power now dwarfs the IBM SUMMIT supercomputer, considered as the fastest in the world, capable of 200 petaFLOPS, i.e. 1.88 billion calculations per second.

Taking the experimental structures as starting points, scientists and engineers can simulate how all the atoms in the protein move, effectively filling in the rest of the game that experiments miss. This can reveal new opportunities – new ways to render the virus ineffective and powerless against human immune systems.

One solution can be used to increase and accelerate simulations: multiply the computing power by using thousands of computers around the world. ESI Group is actively involved in this dynamic.

Folding@Home reports that it has seen a 1,200% increase in contributors, with Bitcoin miners also joining the fight, and over 400,000 new volunteers joining over the last two weeks.

James Hartley, North America IT Manager underlines: “We have truly embodied the values within ESI’s culture of passion, social responsibility and energy to bring this initiative to fruition, working together with our team in France to realign and support the efforts”

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping software and services. Specialist in material physics, ESI has developed a unique proficiency in helping industrial manufacturers replace physical prototypes by virtual prototypes, allowing them to virtually manufacture, assemble, test and pre-certify their future products. Coupled with the latest technologies, Virtual Prototyping is now anchored in the wider concept of the Product Performance Lifecycle™, which addresses the operational performance of a product during its entire lifecycle, from launch to disposal. The creation of a Hybrid Twin™, leveraging simulation, physics and data analytics, enables manufacturers to deliver smarter and connected products, to predict product performance and to anticipate maintenance needs.

ESI is a French company listed in compartment B of NYSE Euronext Paris. Present in more than 40 countries, and addressing every major industrial sector, ESI Group employs about 1200 high-level specialists around the world and reported annual sales of €139 million in 2018. For more information, please visit www.esi-group.com.

Sachin R Nalawade
Sachin R Nalawadehttps://dailycadcam.com
Founder and Editor DailyCADCAM. A highly-driven astute professional and avid marketer; equipped with a solid foundation in Academia; Manufacturing, CAD, CAM, CAE industry and Implementing Marketing Initiatives for Global Brands (All Design Software and Hardware Vendors).
Advertisements
spot_img

Latest Posts