Folding@Home 15x faster than world’s fastest supercomputer

Folding@Home continues to make headlines around the world about its rapid progress. In mid-March, it was reported that the university project from Stanford was faster than the 7 fastest supercomputers in the world combined. A week later Folding@Home reached one exaFLOP of computing power. Now the project is closing in on 2.5 exaFLOPS and can boast about being faster than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined.

2.4 exaFLOPs is a number that can be hard for us humans to wrap our head around. The New York Times used the following comparison to try to explain the computing power of IBM Summit: “A person doing one calculation a second would have to live for more than 6.3 billion years to match what the machine can do in a second.”

Folding@Home now exceeds IBM Summit's computing power 15 times over. A person would have to do one calculation per second and keep doing that for about six times the estimated age of the universe to be able to do what Folding@Home does in a second. No matter what examples or illustrations are used it can still be difficult to grasp how powerful the project has become. Suffice it to say that it's impressive.

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

— Folding@home (@foldingathome) April 13, 2020

If you are interested in joining the KitGuru Folding team, or any other Folding@Home group to become part of this amazing project, then you can register to get up and running HERE. If you want to join us, the KitGuruFolders team ID is 196420.

Those who are interested in the most powerful supercomputers and want to compare them to Folding@Home can read more HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: The KitGuru team appreciates all the help we can get in the fight against the COVID-19 virus with Folding@Home, so could you spare a little time and some PC resources to help this great cause?

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