CUDA, Shmuda: Fold Proteins on a MacBook
Details
- External ID
- 45949715
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- CUDA, Shmuda: Fold Proteins on a MacBook
- Website domain
- latentspacecraft.com
- Launched
- Nov. 17, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5447598253275109
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS utilities and system tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- protein folding on macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Porting complex molecular biology deep learning architectures like AlphaFold 3 to Apple MLX requires deep knowledge of structural bioinformatics, tensor math, and low-level GPU kernel optimization.
What it would actually take: This project entails rewriting AlphaFold 3 / OpenFold architectures from PyTorch/CUDA into Apple's MLX framework. The hard parts include reimplementing complex Evoformer and diffusion modules, writing custom Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) kernels for pair representations and invariant point attention, and managing unified memory allocations to fit multi-chain molecular models into Mac RAM.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenFold
Concerns raised: RAM limitations restricting protein size to <1500 residues, MSA and template handling complexity
Feature requests: Support for very large proteins/complexes using Mac VRAM
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 24 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 25 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 4 days after the earliest competitor.
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- reticulumOverVHF · github · 2026-09-15 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- MacDuo · github · 2026-09-10 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Ollama v0.19 · ph · 2026-04-01 · 412 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas · hn · 2026-07-09 · 85 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Schama : 3D file catalog for macOS & iOS · ph · 2026-09-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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