Folding@home project passes 2.4 ExaFLOPS, more than the top 500 supercomputers combined

[midian182]

What just happened? The Folding@home project has reached another milestone, passing a massive 2.4 ExaFLOPS of combined performance. That’s more than the top 500 supercomputers combined, and 15 times faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer: IBM’s Summit.

The Pande Lab at Stanford University has been running the Folding@home project for almost twenty years. The distributed compute network utilizes volunteers’ spare CPU and GPU power, combining the resources of thousands of home systems to understand better how proteins fold. Hopefully, the simulations can lead to treatments for diseases such as cancer and Parkinson's.

Last month saw Folding@home thrust into the spotlight after it added Covid-19 to the list of diseases it’s researching. In less than a week, 400,000 people had signed up to lend their system resources to the project, giving it access to 470 PetaFLOPS of power. Another week later, the cumulative performance reached 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.

Now, Folding@home has passed an incredible 2.4 ExaFLOPS. IBM’s Summit, which tops the most powerful supercomputers list, has a peak output of 200 PetaFLOPS and a LINPACK benchmark of 148.6 PetaFLOPS.

Folding@home’s director, Greg Bowman, tweeted that the service has had to refocus its efforts from setting up new projects to moving data off servers to make room for more. With around 6TB of data arriving every hour, it’s not surprising that the project needs more space.

More GPU work units are coming for @foldingathome. We've had to shift some of our effort from setting up projects to moving data off servers to make room for more data. Its amazing how quickly the data is coming in! Something like 6TB/hr.

— Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) April 14, 2020

If you want to become part of Folding@home, just download the client. You’ll be joining several tech outlets and hardware vendors, including Nvidia and EVGA, that have put teams together.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84832-foldinghome-project-passes-24-exaflops-more-than-top.html

 

[Uncle Al]

Together We Can!

 

[kimo1]

What joke is this? For what is this power actually used for?
"...we need your help to reach our goal – which is 1 million folders." - but why?
In the end a random western big pharmacy will spit out a vaccine out of blue, which will have shitton of side effects. I would laugh my *** off if Russia would be the first and only one to provide, like in case of Ebola.

 

[rrwards]

What joke is this? For what is this power actually used for?
"...we need your help to reach our goal – which is 1 million folders." - but why?
In the end a random western big pharmacy will spit out a vaccine out of blue, which will have shitton of side effects. I would laugh my *** off if Russia would be the first and only one to provide, like in case of Ebola.

You seem like the kind of person who wouldn't care either way, but there's actually a ton of usefulness in the project that's been running for almost 2 decades. They've been important contributors to a lot of research, including cancer, Alzheimers, Huntingtons, HIV, Ebola, antibiotics, antivirals, and prions. There's a summary (with citations) of all of this on their wikipedia page. Here's the science papers they've actually helped produce too.

https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/

 

[shamus087]

I always wondered if Bitcoin machines could do the mining for the coins and somehow apply some of the power for this project. Bitcoins hold no real value but folding at home does.

 

[HyPeroxya]

I always wondered if Bitcoin machines could do the mining for the coins and somehow apply some of the power for this project. Bitcoins hold no real value but folding at home does.

Bitcoins hold as much value as any other currency .. I'm not a fan, as its incredibly wasteful, but $$/££ are only good as long as ppl believe in them. Real value? Does Gold, Diamonds,Rubys have any real value?
Gold will drown you, if you steal it from the tomb, the Ancient Ones will see to that
But no, specialized asics couldnt, FPGA might , if somebody devised the programmimg for it , same as GPU ...

 

[Athlonite]

What's the point when you can't get Work Units to process anyways I let my machine go at it for a month and got 6 WU's for the past two weeks I've had nothing zero zilch nada except one wu that was a corrupt wu that didn't do anything except state it was a corrupt wu as soon as it tried to initialize so waste of time, power and my money for nothing