English

Fold-CP: A Context Parallelism Framework for Biomolecular Modeling

Quantitative Methods 2026-03-17 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Machine Learning Biomolecules

Abstract

Understanding cellular machinery requires atomic-scale reconstruction of large biomolecular assemblies. However, predicting the structures of these systems has been constrained by hardware memory requirements of models like AlphaFold 3, imposing a practical ceiling of a few thousand residues that can be processed on a single GPU. Here we present NVIDIA BioNeMo Fold-CP, a context parallelism framework that overcomes this barrier by distributing the inference and training pipelines of co-folding models across multiple GPUs. We use the Boltz models as open source reference architectures and implement custom multidimensional primitives that efficiently parallelize both the dense triangular updates and the irregular, data-dependent pattern of window-batched local attention. Our approach achieves efficient memory scaling; for an N-token input distributed across P GPUs, per-device memory scales as O(N2/P)O(N^2/P), enabling the structure prediction of assemblies exceeding 30,000 residues on 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. We demonstrate the scientific utility of this approach through successful developer use cases: Fold-CP enabled the scoring of over 90% of Comprehensive Resource of Mammalian protein complexes (CORUM) database, as well as folding of disease-relevant PI4KA lipid kinase complex bound to an intrinsically disordered region without cropping. By providing a scalable pathway for modeling massive systems with full global context, Fold-CP represents a significant step toward the realization of a virtual cell.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14806,
  title  = {Fold-CP: A Context Parallelism Framework for Biomolecular Modeling},
  author = {Dejun Lin and Simon Chu and Vishanth Iyer and Youhan Lee and John St John and Kevin Boyd and Brian Roland and Xiaowei Ren and Guoqing Zhou and Zhonglin Cao and Polina Binder and Yuliya Zhautouskaya and Jakub Zakrzewski and Maximilian Stadler and Kyle Gion and Yuxing Peng and Xi Chen and Tianjing Zhang and Philipp Junk and Michelle Dimon and Paweł Gniewek and Fabian Ortega and McKinley Polen and Ivan Grubisic and Ali Bashir and Graham Holt and Danny Kovtun and Matthias Grass and Luca Naef and Rui Wang and Jian Peng and Anthony Costa and Saee Paliwal and Eddie Calleja and Timur Rvachov and Neha Tadimeti and Roy Tal and Emine Kucukbenli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14806},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:21:26.713Z