'Folding@Home Now More Powerful Than World's Top 7 Supercomputers, Combined' "The fight against coronavirus goes nuclear" - Tom's

[UsandThem]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/folding-at-home-worlds-top-supercomputers-coronavirus-covid-19

Propelled by average enthusiasts in their shared quest to defeat COVID-19, the Folding@Home network is now pushing out 470 PetaFLOPS of raw compute power. To put that in perspective, that's twice as fast as Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer, making the network faster than any known supercomputer. It's also faster than the top seven supercomputers in the world, combined.

Pretty cool stuff.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Wow! I can certainly forgive them for a bit of server troubles knowing this.

 

[ao_ika_red]

I know one can simulate nuclear fallout in markfw's house in no time.

 

[ZipSpeed]

I can say that my desire to fight COVID-19, and the race between Anandtech and Tom‘s has reignited my lust for new hardware. Originally just had a 1060 on the project. Added my 2070 Super yesterday. Now, I just ordered a 2080 Ti. CPU upgrades were suppose to be this year’s project. But eff it, the science is far too important!

 

[borandi]

If you're buying hardware for the contest, then here's a good guide:

Folding@home GPUs PPD Price Watt - Google Drive

docs.google.com

 

[Endgame124]

If you're buying hardware for the contest, then here's a good guide:

Folding@home GPUs PPD Price Watt - Google Drive

docs.google.com

That is a fantastic little snapshot. I could put my 1080ti in the kids old APU Kaveri, and pickup 2 2060s for folding.

is there a certain point where it becomes CPU constrained? I have an old trinity apu box sitting around doing nothing I could at least put a 1050ti in...

 

[borandi]

In theory, no. My current bottom rig is an i3-4130T, running two GPUs. The only thing I'd suggest is that you don't make the CPU fold, just so it has the processing power for the GPUs.

 

[Endgame124]

Hmm, I have a core2quad with whatever ATI video card was top end back in that time... 9700pro? I imagine that isn’t worth powering up..,

 

[Markfw]

Hmm, I have a core2quad with whatever ATI video card was top end back in that time... 9700pro? I imagine that isn’t worth powering up..,

Anything under 100k ppd ? I wouldn;t

 

[blckgrffn]

Hmm, I have a core2quad with whatever ATI video card was top end back in that time... 9700pro? I imagine that isn’t worth powering up..,

Nope, but I picked up a pair of nvidia GXT 950s on eBay for $70 shipped - nice ones too - and they are each doing over 100k ppd in older rigs atm. That's not why I bought them, but at ~95W TDP they are kind to older power supplies as well. There are some affordable cards out there that have oomph - the RX470 I have in my little boys PC is turning 300k ppd @ ~140W per the radeon driver. I paid $80 shipped for that eBay as well, I think.

 

[borandi]

Currently doing inventory of my old stock, and found I have two 3870x2 cards and four 4870x2 cards. There's one way to heat up a neighborhood I mean, useless for folding at this point, but still

 

[StefanR5R]

The capacity of several supercomputers of the DoE, academia, and industry is now offered to researchers for COVID-19 related projects:

• COVID-19 HPC Consortium
• IBM press release

So far, they are bringing 330 PetaFLOPS to the table. I think we as F@h contributors can say: Not bad -- not bad at all -- and welcome to the club! :-)

I certainly am glad that these resources are being directed towards the fight against the pandemic.

 

[blckgrffn]

Currently doing inventory of my old stock, and found I have two 3870x2 cards and four 4870x2 cards. There's one way to heat up a neighborhood I mean, useless for folding at this point, but still

Those were quite the pieces of hardware in their day. 4x 4870x2s? lol, that's crazy

 

[borandi]

I used to be world #2 in competitive overclocking

 

[Endgame124]

Is anyone plotting the folding stats page Tflops stat? Looks like it up to 767 petaflops... that’s a >50% increase in, what, 5 days?

 

[ZipSpeed]

Folding@Home Reaches Exascale: 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second for COVID-19

www.anandtech.com

Folding@home has announced that cumulative compute performance of systems participating in the project has exceeded 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. The level of performance currently available from Folding@home participants is by an order of magnitude higher than that of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.


Right now, cumulative performance of active CPUs and GPUs (which have returned Work Units within the last 50 days) participating in the Folding@home project exceeds 1,5 ExaFLOPS, which is 10 times faster than performance of IBM’s Summit supercomputer benchmarked for 148.6 PetaFLOPS. To get there, Folding@Home had to employ 4.63 million CPU cores as well as nearly 430 thousand GPUs. Considering the nature of distributed computing, not all CPU cores and GPUs are online at all times, so performance available for Folding@home projects varies depending on availability of hardware.

Folding@home Active CPUs & GPUs Reported on Wed, 25 Mar 2020 23:04:31 GMT​
	AMD GPUs​	NVIDIA GPUs​	CPUs​	CPU Cores​	TFLOPS​	x86 TFLOPS​
Windows	75,823​	314,952​	474,277​	3,588,315​	680,371​	1,384,998​
Linux	3,675​	41,113​	78,124​	811,997​	85,028​	167,152​
macOS	-​	-​	41,582​	230,198​	2,578​	2,578​
Total	79,498​	356,065​	593,983​	4,630,510​	767,977​	1,554,728​
Note:	CPUs and GPUs which have returned Work Units within the last 50 days are considered Active.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has been taxing for a number of computational biology and chemistry projects. IBM recently formed its COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that pools together major supercomputers run by various research institutions and technology companies in the USA to run research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. Cumulative performance of supercomputers participating in IBM’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium is 330 PetaFLOPS.


Folding@home distributed computing project uses compute capabilities to run simulations of protein dynamics in a bid to better understand them and find cures for various diseases. Recently F@H started to run projects simulating theoretically druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2, which attracted a lot of attention as SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are clearly the hottest topics these days.


We at AnandTech also have our Folding@Home team, which are currently in a race against our sister site Tom's Hardware. If you have a GPU spare that's not too old, think about joining us in our battle. We are Team 198.

Wowzers!!! Loving the nerd passion during this crisis.

 

[mopardude87]

Wowzers!!! Loving the nerd passion during this crisis.

Yeah me too! I even shared stuff on my wall on Facebook hoping more people will join our team. I know one friend who MAY for sure join team, he usually runs Seti@ Home. Been like 10 years i think since i ran more then one computer in a folding farm.

 

[ZipSpeed]

Yeah me too! I even shared stuff on my wall on Facebook hoping more people will join our team. I know one friend who MAY for sure join team, he usually runs Seti@ Home. Been like 10 years i think since i ran more then one computer in a folding farm.

I did the same. Most of my friends and family are not tech-savvy though, so I'm not expecting much in terms of recruitment.

 

[mopardude87]

I did the same. Most of my friends and family are not tech-savvy though, so I'm not expecting much in terms of recruitment.

Yeah the same but out of my 62 friends i could vouch that maybe a good 13 of them honestly will now what to do with it. The rest well it would certainly be a learning curve.

 

[Assimilator1]

ServeTheHome recent joined the Tom's Hardware team with an impressively-fast Gigabyte G481-S80 server armed with a whopping eight Nvidia Tesla P100-SXM2's running for the cause.

Is that why their pulling ahead now?

borandi
Those 4870s might be useful for Einstein@home, good DP power , assuming that project still supports them, milkyway@home stopped supporting them a couple of years ago or so.

 

[ZipSpeed]

ServeTheHome recent joined the Tom's Hardware team with an impressively-fast Gigabyte G481-S80 server armed with a whopping eight Nvidia Tesla P100-SXM2's running for the cause.

Is that why their pulling ahead now?

borandi
Those 4870s might be useful for Einstein@home, good DP power , assuming that project still supports them, milkyway@home stopped supporting them a couple of years ago or so.

We just need Mark to run his fleet at full potential to offset that newcomer at Tom’s!

 

[Markfw]

ServeTheHome recent joined the Tom's Hardware team with an impressively-fast Gigabyte G481-S80 server armed with a whopping eight Nvidia Tesla P100-SXM2's running for the cause.

Is that why their pulling ahead now?

borandi
Those 4870s might be useful for Einstein@home, good DP power , assuming that project still supports them, milkyway@home stopped supporting them a couple of years ago or so.

Anybody check the stats on that boy ? what ppd is it getting ?

Edit: I am getting 13.5m ppd at the moment.

 

[borandi]

I would say that the STH system with eight P100s could be worth up to 18-24m PPD, but no-one on their stats page that is new is doing anywhere near that much.
So either it's not up and running for them (which I expect), or it's getting no work.

Overnight my machines seemed to get work fairly easy, so perhaps there's an end to work drought.
That being said, I'm going to have to shift some of my GPUs around today as some of my makeshift systems are getting in the way of my actual work.

Edit: There are now FIVE servers on azure. sweet.

 

[borandi]

In case people missed it:


Here's a summary of current Folding@Home situation:

• We know about the work unit shortage
• It's happening because of an approximately 20x increase in demand
• We are working on it and hope to have a solution very soon.
• Keep your machines running, they will eventually fold on their own.
• Every time we double our server resources, the number of Donors trying to help goes up by a factor of 4, outstripping whatever we do.

The employees over at VMware have also created a special Folding@Home VMware appliance, links are also available on the official F@H download page. It can be deployed on any standalone ESXi 6.0+, Fusion, or Workstation setup! It is automatically configured to the VMware team however, so it is worth changing this to team 198.

 

[VirtualLarry]

• Every time we double our server resources, the number of Donors trying to help goes up by a factor of 4, outstripping whatever we do.

... and their cup runneth over! (Biblical reference, if you didn't get it.)