Folding@home has broken past the exaFLOP barrier

The Foildng@home project has officially broken the exaFLOP barrier, making the distributed computing network more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in the world.

For context, one exaFLOP is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, which is enough power to outperform the world’s top 100 supercomputers combined. Folding@home has also claimed that the project is around 10x faster than the IBM Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer. 

Earlier this week, Folding@home‘s Greg Bowman ran the numbers and found that Folding@home now has access to 474 PetaFLOPS of computing power, representing an increase in network performance of over 4.7x over the network’s pre-Covid-19 numbers. Now, the network has more than doubled its performance levels in less than a week.  This highlights the desire to help tackle the global Covid-19 pandemic in whatever way they can.
 
This success for the Folding@home project comes thanks to the generosity of the PC gaming community, from the many hardware-focused websites who have written articles and started dedicated Folding teams to assist the project to the many gamers who have dedicated their PC’s performance to the cause. 

A special mention must also go to the PCMasterRace Subreddit and the Linus Tech Tips community, who has quickly become two of the world’s fastest team with over 22,000 and 51,000 active users respectively. At the time or writing, OC3D’s Redline Folding Team is currently placed 83rd in terms of daily point generation, and that is with only 116 active Folders. 

Right now, the Folding@home project has both CPU and GPU-based projects which are designed to simulate the properties of Covid-19’s proteins. This will allow researchers to analyse where drugs can potentially interact with the virus and discover new treatments methods that will help increase the survival chances of sufferers. 

Currently, the Folding@Home project is currently working on similar projects to assist research into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and more. This makes Folding@home a great project to support, even if your computer isn’t working on Covid-19/Coronavirus directly.    
 

 

Want to start Folding? 

Earlier this month, we released a guide on how to start Folding using Windows-based PCs. Today, Covid-19 projects on Folding@Home are both CPU and GPU-based, allowing PC users to dedicate most of their PC’s performance to fighting the pandemic. 

At this time, you cannot dedicate your PC’s resources specifically to Coronavirus-related projects, but know that all of Folding@home’s projects are useful for disease research. 

For almost ten years, OC3D has hosted the Redline @ OC3D folding team (team number 98860). Those who are interested in folding should head over to our Folding@home subforum if you want to join the team or discuss folding with our active team members. 

You can join the discussion on Folding@home gaining breaking the exaflop battier on the OC3D Forums.