First Colo receives participant certificate from the voluntary project Rosetta@home
Frankfurt am Main, April 21st 2020: As an IT-organisation, we would like to make our contribution to the fight against the ongoin COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, we have been supporting the voluntary project Rosetta@home since April 9th, 2020. The project makes use of distributed computing, thereby promoting research into cures for various diseases, such as COVID-19, AIDS, cancer, malaria, and Alzheimer’s. The software platform BOINC forms the basis for the computation.
Background of the project Rosetta@home
Distributed computing is the process of combining several independent computers, which ultimately present themselves to the user as a single system. This combination consequently allows for the solving of complex tasks, that could otherwise only be tackled by several supercomputers.
The project Rosetta@home aims to predict specific protein structures and their bonds from a given amino acid sequence. For this purpose, algorithms are developed and tested. A reliable prediction will then form the basis for the development of therapeutics and diagnostics. The project is carried out by the University of Washington and has been running since September of 2005. At this point, it includes more than 44,000 home computers and servers that contribute their unused computing power.
Unfortunately, to this day, there is still no explicit algorithm which can reliably predict and calculate the structure of proteins using amino acid sequences. Hence, the project continues to strive for a transparent and sustainable solution to advance disease research around the globe. We at First Colo want to continue contributing as much as we can and work proactively against the pandemic. As a team, we will therefore gladly support the project Rosetta@home as well as another similar project Folding@home in the future.