You fold, I fold, we all fold for COVID-19
By Charles Levere, on March 26, 2020.
Earlier today the Team over at Folding @ Home sent out a tweet saying they have broken the exaFLOP Barrier! Breaking the exaFLOP barrier is no small task. For perspective the amount of compute power the Folding at Home network has at its disposal is about 10x more than the current fastest supercomputer, the IBM Summit.
Active CPUs & GPUs by OS
| OS | AMD GPUs | NVidia GPUs | CPUs | CPU cores | TFLOPS | x86 TFLOPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | 75,823 | 314,952 | 474,277 | 3,588,315 | 680,371 | 1,384,998 |
| Linux | 3,675 | 41,113 | 78,124 | 811,997 | 85,028 | 167,152 |
| macOSX | 0 | 0 | 41,582 | 230,198 | 2,578 | 2,578 |
| Totals | 79,498 | 356,065 | 593,983 | 4,630,510 | 767,977 | 1,554,728 |
Just last week when I was looking into installing Folding @ Home on my own PC that number was around 450+ petaFLOPS. At that time the number of people volunteering their hardware had jumped from around 30,000 to around 400,000. Thanks to more TechTubers and other media outlets spreading the word and more people like you donating your resources. They are now sitting at 1.5 exaFLOPS of compute power.
If you are thinking of donating your computers resources to fight COVID-19 you can head over to https://foldingathome.org/ and see if its right for you. They also have a COVID-19 page where they explain “What we’re doing and how you can help.”
Our specialty is in using computer simulations to understand proteins’ moving parts. Watching how the atoms in a protein move relative to one another is important because it captures valuable information that is inaccessible by any other means.
