Crusoe Energy Systems, in partnership with Folding@Home Consortium (a distributed computing system for life-science research launched out of Stanford University), is donating part of its computing systems and power toward the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.
The company is able to generate increased computing processes and capability by means of its Digital Flare Mitigation system, which captures otherwise flared or wasted natural gas to power computing processes at the wellhead. The Mitigation system utilizes upwards of twenty energy-intensive computing modules throughout the U.S’s oil and gas fields.
So far, Crusoe has configured eight of its graphic processing units to support the Folding@Home Consortium’s vaccine development project, and has provided work units for COVID-19 research in its field operations center in North Dakota.
Once the computing power has been generated, the Consortium grants researchers the ability to remotely utilize Crusoe’s computational resources for the vaccine search and discovery process. In addition, the Consortium has recently launched a protein folding simulation project targeting vaccines and therapeutic antibodies for COVID-19 thanks to the additional resources stemming from Crusoe.
As researchers were quick to discover, COVID-19 shares many similarities with the SARS coronavirus in that both infect the lungs when viral proteins bind to receptor proteins in lung cells. In order to defeat SARS, a therapeutic antibody–which is a protein that can prevent the SARS coronavirus from binding to lung receptors–was previously developed.
According to the Consortium, in order to develop a similar antibody for COVID-19, researchers need to better understand how the COVID-19 spike protein binds to receptors in the human body. The Consortium’s protein folding project is helping to shed light on the workings of the deadly new virus by simulating antibody proteins and how they might prevent viral infection. The simulation process, however, is very computationally and energy intensive, which is why additional computing power from companies such as Crusoe has become a key factor in the fight against COVID-19.