Show HN: CUDA, Shmuda: Fold Proteins on a MacBook

latentspacecraft.com

11 pointsgeoffitect3 comments

Alphafold3 used to be fodder for HPC clusters; now I've got a port running smoothly on Apple Silicon. If you have an M-series Mac (~2023-present), you can generate protein structures from sequences in minutes. Give it a try!

GitHub repo: https://github.com/latent-spacecraft/openfold-3-mlx

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Can you fold very large proteins/complexes with the large amount of VRAM available on Macs? Ram limitations forcing folding runs to proteins ~<1500 is an annoying nit for a lot of protein folding workflows for me—I'd be curious to see if this helps.

Curious to try, thanks for putting this out.

What did you find to be the most surprising challenge in this project?

^How convoluted MSA and template handling is under the hood in openfold. I’m working on a simple offline replacement next. Compared to that, the attention functions were fairly easy to convert to MLX ops.

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