Dutch National Institute joins in the fight against COVID-19

The Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, known as Nikhef, is dedicating the computation power from its freshly built computer cluster to the fight against COVID-19. The computer cluster is based on the Lenovo SR655 and consists of more than 3800 AMD compute cores and 31 terabytes of memory.

Nikhef usually spends its time and effort researching the elementary building blocks of the universe. However, drastic times call for drastic measures and therefore the Dutch Institute has decided that its computer cluster – that was installed in order to cope with the increasing data streams coming from CERN – should be used to help fight COVID-19.

Image credit: StorageReview

Nikhef is donating the computing power to the Rosetta@home project, which is trying to unravel the underlying protein structure with massive calculation nodes. The Rosetta@home project, run by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington, is similar to folding@home. However, instead of using the GPU, Rosetta@Home uses the computational power generated by the CPU.

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KitGuru says: It's always encouraging seeing companies and institutions joining the fight against COVID-19. Hopefully we will see the end of the virus soon.

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