Earlier this month it came to our attention that the research company Folding@Home was offering people the unique opportunity to get involved in potentially finding a cure for the Coronavirus. Allowing people the option to ‘donate’ their CPU and GPU power, similar to cryptocurrency mining, the research company could use that power (in conjunction with other people) to run protein simulations in order to (fingers crossed) eventually find the cure!
While this sounds rather technical (and it is to a moderate degree) getting involved is actually really simple. So simple, in fact, that within a week of us initially reporting it, Folding@Home claimed to have over 470 million petaFLOPS of donated power at their disposal.
Well, in a report via their Twitter account, it seems things have been taken to a new (and frankly astonishing) level! Folding@Home has confirmed that thanks to the efforts of users, they now have now broken the exaFLOP barrier.
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
Folding@Home Breaks exaFLOP Barrier
Again, we should note that this computational power has been achieved almost entirely by users (like me and you) loaning them the power of our PCs. This combined effort has effectively turned Folding@Home into one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. And, it should be noted, by a pretty stonkingly huge margin!
Even ‘El Capitan’, the next-gen super-computer expected to launch in 2023 isn’t anticipated to come anything close to this figure!
How Can I Get Involved?
After downloading and installing the application (which you can grab via the link here), while running the app, your PC will be used by Folding@Home to perform all manner of research. If you want to set it to specifically work on the Coronavirus, however, you can do this! All you need to do is to ‘create an identity’ and enter a specific ‘team number’ code!
Team Number – 162130
With this code in place, your PC will then start fighting for a cure for COVID-19. Specifically, with the power of your CPU and/or GPU. Better still, presuming you’re not using your PC for gaming at the same time, you can even just let this application plod along in the background. I promise you, you’ll barely notice anything happening!
So, check it out, spread the word, and let’s show the world what PC enthusiasts can do!
What do you think? Have you joined this project? If so, how many points have you earned so far? – Let us know in the comments!
I’m not sure how you get the total but I’m earning around 1210 points per day. My PC is an old Core 2 Quad machine with an ATI 6450 GPU. Only my CPU is currently being used for folding but at least in a very small way, I’m doing my bit. Newer machines and especially those with up to date nVidia graphics will be able to do much more.