Millions Of Home PCs Combine As World's Fastest Supercomputing Grid To Help Defeat COVID-19
Recently, Folding@Home announced that the total compute performance of the systems currently a part of the project has managed to exceed 1.5 ExaFLOPS or around 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating operations per second.
Scientists around the world are doing whatever it takes to take down the novel coronavirus by finding a compound that works against it and turn it into a vaccine. However, not every researcher has access to a supercomputer to make these calculations.
Reuters
To help such scientists, Folding@Home came together to ask PC users across the globe to share their computer¡¯s processing power with the researchers to help them out, and this has caused a tsunami of computing performance.
Reported first by Anand Tech, recently, Folding@Home announced that the total compute performance of the systems currently a part of the project has managed to exceed 1.5 ExaFLOPS or around 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating operations per second.
In case you were wondering how fast this really is, it is ten times faster than the world¡¯s fastest supercomputer Summit -- developed by IBM. IBM Summit at its peak maxes out at 148.6 PetaFLOPS, which surely is a lot, but nowhere close to what Folding@Home is churning out.
To derive such compute performance, Folding@Home has taken help of 4.63 million CPU cores and around 450,000 GPUs. Sure, this strength is not available at all times, so the actual compute number keeps fluctuating.
Today, the total amount of performance supercomputers across the world participating in IBM¡¯s COVID-19 HPC Consortium are generating, is around 330 PetaFLOPS.
Today, the COVID-19 coronavirus has taken a tighter grasp on the lives of the people around the world, infecting 462 684 and claiming lives of over 20 834.
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY¡¯S OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
Here¡¯s how you can help
In case you were willing to give your processing power to save the world, all you need to do is download and install Folding@Home. Once installed, simply run the app and it will take you to web control.
Fill the necessary details and once done, the app will start using your processing power. You have the option to set manual limits to not impact your personal performance.
Obviously it is advisable to do this in case you have a powerful system with empty resources ready to be shared. You can also do this in case you have a spare PC lying around and just want to contribute to the cause.
