Folding as a Service

Introduction

Folding@Home Initiative is a sacred distributed-computing project for performing molecular-simulations of protein dynamics, researching in for Alzheimer's disease, Cancer, Ebola and recently COVID-19. The project uses the idle processing resources of computers owned by volunteers who have installed the client software.

The protein-folding computer simulations from the Folding@home project is said to be "quantitatively" comparable to real-world experimental results. The method for this yield has been called a "holy grail" in Computational biology.

Folding refers to the way human protein folds in the cells that make up your body. We rely on the proteins to keep us healthy and they assemble themselves by folding. But when they misfold, there can be serious consequences to a person’s health.

Even, I have envisioned this project concept during the time, I did folding for the Element14 Team[240845] and luckily was assigned to Project 11761[Protease-PDT - SARS-CoV-2 ]

Getting to indulge yourself in such noble cause indeed demands resources like computing time, electricity bills and stable internet connection.

While some of us do contribute on their own, indeed there are times when humans 'do-think' in terms of profits and or losses, in short what do I get out of this? , although there exists million reasons to pursue on such brilliant endeavors, still there exists a gap which can be filled through incentive-driven approach i.e. one gets his fair-share of CPU/GPU contribution in terms of tokens, hence increasing resources and simultaneously building a massive distributed computing network for the next big thing.

Defining Industry Marketplace

The Industry Marketplace establishes a vendor-neutral marketplace for Industry 4.0 components to buy and sell goods, data and services(Folding in this case). Unlike conventional virtual marketplaces, the Industry Marketplace, powered by IOTA, is an​ autonomous and decentralized platform for offering and searching for data and services, which is open to everyone free of charge.

A participant in the Industry Marketplace can take one of two roles: the role of Service Requester or Service Provider. The Service Requester searches for some data or services, e.g. charging, transporting, drilling, Folding, etc., offered by a Service Provider. The Service Requester chooses a Service Provider (Folding Client:PC) and processes a payment in IOTA tokens, once the service is successfully fulfilled.

Getting Started (installations...)

Before getting the Industry Market Manager instance, do make sure to have the following installations:

1) Node.js (greater than Version 10[current])

2) Yarn

3) Git

Windows: Get cross-compiled versions for your configuration on respective service application links.

RPi: (check the GitHub code section for installation instructions & direct links)

After necessary pre-requisites, perform cloning or optionally download the Industry Marketplace repository from GitHub link :

git clone https://github.com/iotaledger/industry-marketplace.git

- Navigate to ServiceApp directory:

cd /industry-marketplace/ServiceApp

- Build & Launch the MarketplaceManager application :

yarn run dev

Folding Client [Service Provider]

-ForFolding User Instance:254447#1FC;1

254447: Team RegistrationNumber [IOTAontheGo]

FC: FoldingClient [PC/SBC/Android]

1: User I.D.

Payment Broker [Service Requester]

ForSBC Broker Instance:254447#PI;A

254447: Team I.D.

PI: SBC Type (primarily RPi)

A: SBC I.D.

Though I have noticed the pi3b+ disconnects itself during the active VNC sessions during the localhost session, hence needs a manual approach for our ProofofWork(PoW).

- Then after get the Helper-Client and within, create a Python virtual environment.

git clone https://github.com/iota-community/industry-marketplace-python-helper.git helper

python3 -m venv ~/my_venvsource ~/my_venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

..Though the project justifies minimal proof of concept based on devnet-Tangle for custom 'service' based on IOTA Marketplace, still much needs to be done for actual deployment in the wild.

The next step would be to integrate Trinity Wallet with the MPM instance..