Neocortix Brings Folding@Home, Alongside Rosetta@Home, to 64-bit Arm Devices for COVID-19 Research

Following on from its Rosetta@Home port, Folding@Home is now available for 64-bit Arm devices including smartphones, tablets, and SBCs.

UPDATE 2020-08-14:

The latest Folding@Home Beta client for Linux is now available compiled for ARM64, allowing those running 64-bit Linux-based operating systems on their Raspberry Pis or other single-board computers (SBCs) and other embedded systems to install the application directly.

The Arm beta is available to download now from the official website, alongside betas for Linux on AMD64, Windows, and macOS.

Original article continues below.

Distributed computing specialist Neocortix has announced the porting of Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home to 64-bit Arm devices — allowing modern smartphones, tablets, and embedded systems like the Raspberry Pi 4, to contribute computing power to researching into a vaccine for COVID-19.

Four months ago, Neocortix announced the launch of a Rosetta@Home port to enable Arm-based systems to contribute to protein-folding research work aiming to find a vaccine for COVID-19. At the time, the company said it was working on doing the same for Folding@Home — another distributed computing project working towards the same goal.

Now, the company has announced success on both fronts. "We built Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home for Arm-based devices to enable billions of high-performance mobile devices to work on the search for a COVID-19 vaccine," explains Dr. Lloyd Watts, Neocortix founder and CEO, of the work. "We saw an opportunity to leverage our Neocortix Cloud Services platform to help meet the distributed computing needs of the most pressing academic research workloads, at enormous scale."

"As we head towards a world of a trillion connected devices, developer innovation is helping to tackle some of the world's most complex challenges from the endpoint and edge to the cloud," adds Paul Williamson, vice president and general manager, Client Line of Business at Arm. "Arm's collaboration with Neocortix means that Arm-based technology can contribute spare compute capacity to critical COVID-19 research and it's incredible to see Arm's global developer ecosystem come together to support this effort."

"We've been watching the increasing computational power of phones and other mobile devices for years," admits Dr. Greg Bowman, director of Folding@Home. "This collaboration with Neocortix and Arm provided the perfect opportunity to tap into these resources to accelerate our COVID-19 research."

The Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home ports are now available on Neocortix's Scalable Compute Instances cloud computing platform and have been contributed back upstream for general use; more technical details can be found on the updated Neocortix "Coronablog."

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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