Folding@Home Reaches Exascale: 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second for COVID-19

Folding@home has announced that cumulative compute performance of systems participating in the project has exceeded 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. The level of performance currently available from Folding@home participants is by an order of magnitude higher than that of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Right now, cumulative performance of active CPUs and GPUs (which have returned Work Units within the last 50 days) participating in the Folding@home project exceeds 1,5 ExaFLOPS, which is 10 times faster than performance of IBM’s Summit supercomputer benchmarked for 148.6 PetaFLOPS. To get there, Folding@Home had to employ 4.63 million CPU cores as well as nearly 430 thousand GPUs. Considering the nature of distributed computing, not all CPU cores and GPUs are online at all times, so performance available for Folding@home projects varies depending on availability of hardware.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has been taxing for a number of computational biology and chemistry projects. IBM recently formed its COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that pools together major supercomputers run by various research institutions and technology companies in the USA to run research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. Cumulative performance of supercomputers participating in IBM’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium is 330 PetaFLOPS.

Folding@home distributed computing project uses compute capabilities to run simulations of protein dynamics in a bid to better understand them and find cures for various diseases. Recently F@H started to run projects simulating theoretically druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2, which attracted a lot of attention as SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are clearly the hottest topics these days.

We at AnandTech also have our Folding@Home team, which are currently in a race against our sister site Tom's Hardware. If you have a GPU spare that's not too old, think about joining us in our battle. We are Team 198.

Related Reading:

• IBM & Partners to Fight COVID-19 with Supercomputers, Forms COVID-19 HPC Consortium
• Help Fight COVID-19 and Tom's Hardware: Join The Great Folding@Home Coronavirus Race

Source: Folding@Home Twitter