Global PC Users Unite To Form World's Fastest Supercomputer To Find COVID 19 Cure

IBM Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world, with a computing speed of quintillion operations per second. With people in lockdown due to the Coronavirus outbreak, global PC users have beaten this mark by as much as fifteen times through the distributed computing project Folding@home.

The developers of Folding@home have recently posted an update on Twitter wherein they disclosed the current computational power of the project to be 2.4 exaFLOPs.

Reuters

With that number crunching speed, Folding@home does not just beat the IBM Summit, theoretically it even outpaces the sustained output of the top 500 supercomputers combined.

With our collective power, we are now at ~2.4 exaFLOPS (faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined)! We complement supercomputers like IBM Summit, which runs short calculations using 1000s of GPUs at once, by spreading longer calculations around the world in smaller chunks! pic.twitter.com/fdUaXOcdFJ

¡ª Folding@home (@foldingathome) April 13, 2020

Apart from the tweet, Folding@home director Gregory Bowman also participated in a Reddit AMA recently wherein he mentioned ¡°We had about 30K users before the pandemic started. In the past two weeks, 400K volunteers have joined Folding@home.¡±

For those unaware, Folding@home is a project that lets PC users anywhere in the world share their unused computer power to research potential cures for diseases. It was started by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University in collaboration with major industry entities.

The purpose of the Folding@home project is to help in lengthy computational problems faced during molecular dynamics simulations of protein. These simulations are meant to help with research on diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer as well as the ongoing COVID-19 or novel Coronavirus disease.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

The last part right there is the reason for the boost in the support to the project in the recent months. With now around two decades of its existence, the project¡¯s current goal is to reach 1 million participants for the utmost computational power to be used for such noble causes.

Looks like it is headed there. The team is expecting at least half of it in the next few weeks with the ongoing lockdown.

Eventually, it is the Coronavirus that is helping beat itself through the use of computers. It might be time we all hail technology, and ourselves for sitting at home!