Folding@Home hits ExaFLOP: one quintillion plus operations per second

The Folding@Home project has now reached a new power level, as both the public and companies have given their spare compute power to the project in an attempt to combat the coronavirus COVID-19.

If you don't know what Folding@Home is, it's a project run by Stanford University that allows the public to donate spare GPU/CPU compute power into a single force to be reckoned with. Just last week, Folding@Home received donated compute power from more than 400,000 volunteers, bringing its power level to an astonishing 470 petaFLOPS of computing performance.

To put that number into context, the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's 'Summit' has a peak compute of 200 petaFLOPS. Now, a recent announcement from the Folding@Home Twitter page has revealed that the project has hit another milestone - "Thanks to our AMAZING community, we've crossed the exaFLOP barrier! That's over a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second making us ~10x faster than the IBM Summit!" In fact, according to the stat page for Folding@Home, the project has crossed over to 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. The power of Folding@Home is being aimed directly at uncovering the mysteries of the coronavirus COVID-19.

For more information, check out the Twitter page for Folding@Home, or the Folding@Home website here. If you are interested in lending some compute performance for the good cause, a download link to the Folding@Home client can be found here.