Folding At Home is more powerful than top 500 supercomputers combined, all of this for Covid-19 research

2.4 exaFLOPS is more power than what the top 500 supercomputers in the world have when combined. And all this is to perform research on Covid-19 pandemic.

2.4 exaFLOPS is more power than what the top 500 supercomputers in the world have when combined. And all this is to perform research on Covid-19 pandemic. (Pixabay)

Folding At Home, a Washington DC-based company that performs biomedical research from the unused power of PCs, has reportedly grow to almost 2.4 exaFLOPS of computational power. How much powerful is 2.4 exaFLOPS you ask? That is more powerful than the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined. And all this is to perform research on Covid-19 pandemic.

2.4 exaFLOPS also makes Folding At Home 15 times more power than the world's most powerful supercomputer - IBM Summit. However, it has been said that the power is so much to handle that Folding At Home is not able to use it fully as the creators are not able to keep everyone's computers busy enough.

"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!," tweeted the firm.

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

That said, massive power collection doesn't make Folding At Home stronger than supercomputers. It still takes time to complete big calculations that supercomputers take seconds to complete.

But how does Folding At Home work? The organisation asks you to download a software on to your PC that allows you to share the unused CPU and GPU power with them. The company then allots assigns workloads to your PC from researchers studying Covid-19 Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's or other diseases. Since the research costs a lot of electricity, the workload assigned uses your PC's remaining power to get the work done.

The Folding At Home software is available for Linux, Windows and Mac PCs from their own website.