Folding@home smashes ExaFLOP barrier in COVID-19 fight

All around the world, people are doing what they can to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people are sewing facemasks, others are donating gloves, or just staying at home. Many of us are donating our computer power, and that has helped the Folding@Home network cross the compute power post labeled "exaFLOP."

Thanks to our AMAZING community, we've crossed the exaFLOP barrier! That's over a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, making us ~10x faster than the IBM Summit! pic.twitter.com/mPMnb4xdH3

- Folding@home (@foldingathome) March 25, 2020

That many zeroes in a line starts to get hard to make sense of, so in other words, this is a billion billion operations per second. The fastest supercomputer, IBM's Summit, peaks at 200 petaFLOPS, but runs closer to 148 petaflops in general. Based on Top500's list of supercomputers, Folding@Home is doing more work than the top 100 supercomputers combined. Ghat's about 100,000 RTX 2080 graphics cards duct-taped together if you want to think of it that way.

Not even a week ago, Folding@home Director Greg Bowman announced that the FAH network had over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power. Once FAH turned its gaze toward COVID-19, the influx of participants more than doubled that power.

Geeking out about Supercomputers

As promised, here is our first glimpse of the #COVID19 spike protein (aka the demogorgon) in action, courtesy of @foldingathome . More to come! pic.twitter.com/iD2crCMHcX

- Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) March 16, 2020

It's important to note that while that is a lot of FLOPS, a petaFLOP of FAH isn't quite the same as a petaFLOP in a supercomputer. Think of IBM's Summit and Sierra computers like Godzilla and Mothra; FAH is an army of infantrymen. For a Ghidora-sized problem, you need a supercomputer. Luckily, the sort of power that FAH offers fits problems like COVID-19 especially well. It's about tackling countless small problems to solve a bigger problem, rather than needing to examine one single big simulation.

Another interesting thing to consider here, while we're geeking out about supercomputing, is the idea that FAH is, in a way, futureproof in ways that true supercomputers can never be. Supercomputers tend to be heavily integrated, and upgrading them can be costly and difficult. FAH, though, will increase in power as its network does. When Ampere and RDNA2 graphics cards hit later this year, FAH will see another jump in computing just from people upgrading.

You can join the fight against COVID-19 by installing the Folding@Home application. It's easy to set up, and you can configure it to only work when you're not using your computer-or let it chomp on every free CPU cycle you have.

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