How the pandemic revived a distributed computing project and made history

[LiberalArkie]

Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department of Stanford University launched a distributed computing project called Folding@Home (F@H). They sought to understand how proteins self-organize and find out why this process sometimes goes wrong, causing issues such as cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease.

F@H hit its pinnacle of mindshare—and performance—in 2007, when Sony added it to the PlayStation 3. But like many other projects, it saw a gradual decline in its popularity since. This past March, however, F@H saw a sudden resurgence. Thanks to a confluence of events, notably including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Folding@Home broke the exaFLOP barrier at least one or two years before Intel, AMD, IBM, or Cray could do it. Here’s how those events played out.

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Then in February, everything changed. Folding@Home suddenly went from 30,000 volunteers running the software in February to 400,000 in March—another 300,000 users came on board after that. There were so many users that the database ran out of potential simulations for them to crunch, and data coming in was so great that the servers were overloaded, said Bowman.

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.



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https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-revived-a-distributed-computing-project-and-made-history/

[SheltieLover]

1. Yes!!!

I'm folding here & have posted about this in Computer group & GD a couple of times.

If you have a graphics card in your desktop, you can do this & designate its GPU for the folding. So you don't lose any computing power - no stuttering when watching videos, etc.

This is a fairly new upgrade to be able to choose which components you want to use for folding.

Another more recent update allows you to stack projects so instead of the program having to wait for you to accept a new project, you can accept while still folding a current project.

If anyone would like to join in & you need help getting set up, please fedl free to pm me.

Note: This is no longer available to do on phones. And if you have a regular laptop, it might not be a good idea, due to the intensity of heat. But if you have a super gaming laptop with excellent cooling, you should be good.

I'm running a water cooled tower with 3 graphics cards & it is not heating up the room. For those who might be comcerned about that factor.

Also, if you have multiple graphics cards in your computer, you can designate projects to fold for each one, or only choose the ones you want to fold on.

If you have guru teens, they can get together & fold in teams (for points awarded), or join existing teams. 👍

Thank you for posting, LA!

[SheltieLover]

2. Stanford now offering FLDC - Virtual $ for folding

in an effort to attract bit coin miners, with the logic being that this is a much better use of computing power.

The folding coins can be converted to bit coins, as I understand it. (IDC - I just want the trumpvirus to be eradicated!)

[msongs]

3. and what has this project actually accomplished in 20 years? nt