The coronavirus-learning network has become the most powerful supercomputer. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies around the world have provided the power to simulate how the coronavirus protein enters a human cell.
The power of a distributed computing network exceeded 2.4 exaflops (one million trillion or quintillion). This makes it more powerful than any other supercomputer in the world. Data provided by Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for computer simulation of coagulation of protein molecules.
Previously, the network has already become six times more powerful than the fastest traditional supercomputer – IBM Summit, which is used for scientific research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. On April 15, the network reached a new record, exceeding the speed of the 500 best traditional supercomputers combined. This happened thanks to almost 1 million new network members.
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
During the coronavirus pandemic, several projects were launched on the platform aimed at combating COVID-19. One of the bottom mimics the protein structure of the coronavirus and its effect on the human body. Hundreds of thousands of users and large companies – NVidia, Amazon, Oracle, provided their computing resources for research.
“It is well known that the introduction of the virus into a human cell is a complex process. Each step to study coronavirus can affect the treatment of millions of people in the future”, the researchers note.
