Vijay Pande, a general partner at a16z and Folding@Home founder, teams up with Greg Bowman, an associate professor and current director of the project. They delve into how Folding@Home utilizes distributed computing to tackle protein dynamics and advance drug design, particularly in the context of COVID-19. The duo discusses the project's impressive growth over 20 years and how millions of volunteers have created the world's largest supercomputer. They also explore the technological breakthroughs that have revolutionized protein folding simulations.
32:34
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
question_answer ANECDOTE
Folding@Home and COVID-19
Folding@Home allows millions of people to contribute to fighting COVID-19.
It simulates protein dynamics, like the spike protein's opening, to identify drug targets.
insights INSIGHT
The Origin of Folding@Home
Vijay Pande saw an opportunity to use distributed computing for structural biology and drug design.
The challenge was developing algorithms to combine the power of many computers.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Inspiration and Challenges
SETI@home inspired Vijay Pande, but Napster's distributed computing power also caught his attention.
SETI@home's problem was more suited to distributed computing than protein folding.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Proteins are molecular machines that must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear string of amino acids, assume the complex three-dimensional structure needed to carry out its job?
That's where Folding at Home comes in. Folding at Home is a sophisticated computer program that simulates the way atoms push and pull on each other, applied to the problem of protein dynamics, aka "folding". These simulations help researchers understand protein function and to design drugs and antibodies to target them. Folding at Home is currently studying key proteins from the virus that causes COVID-19 to help therapeutic development.
Given the extreme complexity of these simulations, they require an astronomical amount of compute power. Folding at Hold solves this problem with a distributed computing framework: it breaks up the calculations in the smaller pieces that can be run on independent computers. Users of Folding at Home - millions of them today - donate the spare compute power on their PCs to help run these simulations. This aggregate compute power represents the largest super computer in the world: currently 2.4 exaFLOPS!
Folding at Home was launched 20 years ago this summer in the lab of Vijay Pande at Stanford. In this episode, Vijay (now a general partner at a16z) is joined by his former student and current director of Folding at Home, Greg Bowman, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and Lauren Richardson. We discuss the origins of the Folding at Home project along with its connection to SETI@Home and Napster; also the scientific and technical advances needed to solve the complex protein folding and distributed computing problems; and importantly what does understanding protein dynamics actually achieve?
a16z Podcast 