In the context of the current global situation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re making it easy for us and our customers to commit part of our infrastructure spare resources to the Folding@Home project. In short, Folding@Home uses distributed computing to process large amounts of data for medical research. Amid the current crisis of the COVID-19 virus, they’ve also started generating work units (WU) towards gathering as much information as possible of the virus.
In order to achieve that, we’ve created a Docker image and Helm chart to deploy the Folding@Home client on Kubernetes. It’s deployed in its own namespace and uses a restricted service account for extra security. Pods are going to be deployed with a low priority by default, so customer and infrastructure workloads will always be prioritized over the Folding@Home clients.
The Helm chart allows you to configure the number of Pods to deploy, the priority of those Pods and how much resources (CPU) to make available to the clients. By tweaking those values, you can commit only the spare resources of your cluster(s), or you can contribute extra dedicated resources to the cause.
You can read more information on this in our blog post.
If you’d like to participate in this project, and contribute your spare resources, or even commit dedicated resources, reach out to your Customer Lead and we’ll deploy the Folding@Home client to your K8s clusters.
Note that:
- The Folding@Home client will be registered with your customer name. This name will show up as a donor on the Folding@Home statistics permanently, even after you stop contributing. Let us know if you’d rather be an anonymous donor.
- Your Folding@Home user will be linked to the Skyscrapers team. This way we can track combined efforts and they are publicly visible on the project stats page.