Folding@Home surges as a result of COVID-19 research

The Stanford University project Folding@Home has come a long way since its release in the year 2000. In 2012, it was reported that the project was expected to soon surpass 6 PetaFLOPS. Now Folding@Home is seeing a wave of donations – in form of computing power – and has already reached more than 470 PetaFLOPs of computing power, which is more than the 7 most powerful supercomputers, combined.

Folding@Home recently asked for help to battle the COVID-19 virus. Now Greg Bowman – Director of Folding@home and Associate Prof. at the Washington University School of Medicine – has announced that the project has seen 400,000 new volunteers joining Folding@home in the last two weeks. Compared to the existing 30,000 volunteers before the pandemic, the project has experienced an impressive 1200% increase in just a couple of weeks.

Summit – the world's fastest supercomputer – has a peak performance of 200 PetaFLOPS, which now is beaten by the efforts of close to half a million active users donating their computing power to Folding@home. But Folding@home still sees an opportunity to expand even more and has posted this message on their website: “Regardless if you are already folding or haven’t heard a word about it before, we need your help to reach our goal – which is 1 million folders.”

The main goal for many of the users that donate to Folding@Home is to assist in finding potential treatments to the COVID-19 virus. The supercomputer Summit is also reported, by Futurism, to tackling the same task. It's therefore encouraging to see Greg Bowman's tweet about the progress that has been made in understanding the virus.

As promised, here is our first glimpse of the #COVID19 spike protein (aka the demogorgon) in action, courtesy of @foldingathome . More to come! pic.twitter.com/iD2crCMHcX

— Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) March 16, 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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