Introduction
With the current COVID-19 Pandemic, there has been a lot of interest in the Folding@Home distributed computing project. There has been a huge upsurge in the number of donors that are lending CPU and GPU resources to the project. Because of this, I though it would be useful to aggregate some of the latest Folding@Home news in one place.
Official News
Folding@Home has a web site, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page. There was also a recent Reddit AMA about Folding@Home and COVID-19. Finally, there is an official support forum here. They have some pinned statements here:
- The Folding@home team knows about the work unit shortage.
- It’s happening because of an approximately 20x increase in demand.
- The Folding@home team are working on it and hope to have a solution very soon.
- Keep your machines running, they will eventually fold on their own.
There is an interesting thread here about Performance on modern AMD CPUs, along with another interesting thread about what to consider for a Budget folding build.
Third Party News
There have been quite a few recent stories about Folding@Home and COVID-19.
- Folding@Home Reaches Exascale: 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second for COVID-19
- Folding@Home Network Breaks the ExaFLOP Barrier In Fight Against Coronavirus
- Folding@home Storms Into ExaFLOP Territory As PC Warriors Battle COVID-19
- Here’s How YOU Can Help Find a Cure for COVID-19!
- YouTube Search Results for Folding@Home
- Green Folding@Home (good blog about Folding@Home hardware)
My Blog Posts
I have written several recent blog posts about the SQLFamily Folding@Home team (that you can join). Our Team ID is 236388.
- Building a Home Computer Lab
- Hardware for Folding@Home
- Folding@Home Power Usage
- Help Find a Cure With Folding@Home
Final Words
From my research and real world experience with Folding@Home, it seems pretty evident that it heavily favors GPU performance. Relatively recent vintage Nvidia GPUs, such as the GTX 1060 and higher will give you a lot of points per day (PPD) at a reasonable power usage figure.
I would love to hear more details about the system(s) you are using for Folding@Home. I also want to thank everyone who has pitched in on this effort!