Folding Forum

In light of the recent spike in donors and related infrastructure issues, I was wondering if it was possible for volunteers with the necessary skills to contribute to the development of Folding@Home software development or infrastructure bringup/maintenance etc. From what I gather the software is not open source (which is fine, I and others would be willing to sign an NDA for example). I'm sure there would be a good number of volunteers that want to help you if it was feasible.

I'm not sure that there is much to do in the way of software development -- especially not for those without domain knowledge.
The cores are produced by those with a knowledge of the science of molecular biology.
The client side stuff probably won't be messed with during the COIVID-19 campaign. Too much risk of breaking things big time.
The servers are more a matter of deploying hardware, I'm told software installation is relatively quick. Maybe the server code needs attention, but that needs both deep knowledge of the current workings, the requirements, and some way to avoid breaking things when new versions are deployed into a high load environment.
That leaves just the points system and the protein viewer. Both of which are possibilities, being part of the "pull" for donors but non-critical for the science. However, consider the cost to the full-time developer in taking time to brief a new team....

mrpdaemon wrote:I was wondering if it was possible for volunteers with the necessary skills to contribute to the development of Folding@Home software development or infrastructure bringup/maintenance etc. From what I gather the software is not open source (which is fine, I and others would be willing to sign an NDA for example

The science is Open Source
http://www.gromacs.org/
http://openmm.org/

Selected portions of the communications protocol are not open source, to help prevent cheating, but that is very little code.