We shared details last month of Folding@home, a distributed computing project designed to help find a cure for the coronavirus. By running the app on your Mac, you can contribute to a system which has now become seven times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Indeed, says the project head, there were times when there were so many people participating that the back-end system couldn’t keep up …
Folding@Home had been working on understanding twelve different conditions, when COVID-19 was added to the list.
ArsTechnica reports that the appeal was almost too successful.
There’s still time for you to join in. We mentioned last time that ‘control and viewer apps both look like they were created by a Windows programmer in about 1990.’ The team was working on a more modern app, but that work has now been put on hold while they focus on keeping up with the growing number of participants.
Despite these glitches, F@H zoomed to a peak performance of 1.5 exaFLOPs, making it more than seven times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer, Summit, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory […]
“We handled the first three- to five-fold increase in traffic without breaking a sweat, but when it hit twenty times, our servers were struggling to write all the info people were finding to disk,” he said.
With just six servers at Washington University and partner sites at Sloan Kettering and Temple University, so much data was coming back and being written to disk that F@H stopped sending out work units. New servers have since helped them catch up.
