Items tagged with distributed computing
Finding a cure and developing a vaccine to neutralize COVID-19 is key to saving potentially millions of lives, and getting back to life as we once knew it. That is easier said than done, of course. There is some encouraging news on that front, however, as efforts by the Folding@home project has identified a possible target that could lead to a cure. Folding@home is a distributed computing project that focuses on simulated protein folding, in hopes of better understanding diseases like Alzheimer's in hopes of ultimately developing effective treatments. Like other distributed computing projects, the power is the donated CPU and GPU resources offered up people who choose to download the client software....
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Just a few days ago, the Folding@home distributed computing project had reached 470 petaFLOPS of cumulative compute power, topping out the output of the seven fastest supercomputers in the world. And now? Thanks to a continued surge in activity from users joining the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, Folding@home has more than doubled the amount of data it crunching, and is in exaFLOP territory. "Thanks to our AMAZING community, we've crossed the exaFLOP barrier! That's over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, making us ~10x faster than the IBM Summit!," Folding@home announced on Twitter. That's 18 zeros, folks. To put that figure into perspective, the collective effort of...
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As the coronavirus continues to spread, Standford University's Folding@home project announced that CPU-based protein folding COVID-19 jobs are headed to the distributed computing client. For those who wish to do so, this means they can donate their unused CPU cycles to potentially critical research into the coronavirus. The idea behind distributed computing is drawing strength in numbers. While one solitary PC may have little impact on intense research, especially compared to something like a supercomputer, distributed computing draws from hundreds, thousands, or even millions of PCs, each one sharing valuable resources towards a goal. Folding@home focuses on disease research that simulates protein...
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