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

[geoffitect]

https://latentspacecraft.com/posts/mlx-protein-folding

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

[ray__]

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.

[cyrusradfar]

Curious to try, thanks for putting this out.

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

[geoffitect → cyrusradfar]

^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.