Folding@home network capacity exceeded 1 EFLOPS in the fight against coronavirus

This month, several projects aimed at combating the coronavirus infection COVID-19 were launched on the Folding@home distributed computing network. PCD’s Reddit PCMasterRace enthusiast community joined the initiative and was later supported by Nvidia. On the basis of such a boost, the network has grown to previously unprecedented levels.

Folding@home administrators have announced that they reached one exaFLOPS of computing power. This value corresponds to a quintillion calculations per second, that is 1018 or a million trillion. This is ten times more than the raw computing power of the world’s fastest Summit supercomputer based on the 9216 22-core IBM POWER9 processors and 27648 Nvidia Tesla V100 accelerators. In addition, the total combined power of hundreds of the best supercomputers in the world remains below 1 exaFLOPS.

Interestingly, the influx of users has led to a shortage of work units (small pieces of solid workloads sent to each user), or in other words, the number of computing nodes and their capacity exceeds the actual volume of tasks. Folding@home coordinators are currently working on a solution to the problem.

The global community is joining the Folding@home network to fight the coronavirus. As a result, scientific researchers looking into potential treatments or vaccines have gained access to an unprecedented amount of computing power.

The HOSTKEY team has also connected their free GPU servers to this program and in an effort to assist the scientific community in the fight against the pandemic. We very much hope that our participation will help reduce the number of victims and limit damage to the global economy.

Be healthy!