Folding@home now the world’s most powerful supercomputer

Posted at: 11:45am 24th February 2009 by James Gorbold

AMD and Intel might be edging ever closer to producing octo-core CPUs, but those future processors pale into comparison next to the combined power of distributed computing projects such as the medical research program Folding@home.

Stanford University, the organisers of Folding@home recently announced that its project has just passed the 5 petaflop mark. A flop (floating point operation) is a measure used to compare the performance of different architecture processors, such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs.

In contrast, according to the latest Top 500 list, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, Roadrunner at the US governments Los Alamos nuclear weapons research laboratory, produces just 1.46 petaflops. In fact, the total output of Folding@home is greater than the combined output of the top 6 fastest supercomputers on the list.

This achievement is all the more astonishing when you consider that Roadrunner needs 64,800 dual-core 1.8GHz AMD Opteron CPUs and draws close to 2,500kW, while Folding@home currently has 385,247 active processors. According to Stanford, the latest breakdown of these processors include 306,602 CPUs running a mixture of Windows, MacOS and Linux, 10,606 ATI GPUs, 18,442 Nvidia GPUs and 49,897 PlayStations 3s.

You can contribute to medical science by signing up your CPUs, GPUs and Playstation 3s to the Custom PC folding team, currently ranked number 5 in the world. Download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html and use the team ID: 35947. You can discuss folding with us and other CPC readers in the folding forum.