Folding@home - Participation

Participation

In addition to reporting active processors, Folding@home determines its computing performance as measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS) based on the actual execution time of its calculations. Originally this was reported as native FLOPS: the raw performance from each given type of processing hardware. In March 2009 Folding@home began reporting the performance in native and x86 FLOPS, the latter being an estimation of how many FLOPS the calculation would take on a standard x86 CPU architecture, which is commonly used as a performance reference. Specialized hardware such as GPUs can efficiently perform certain complex functions in a single floating point operation which would otherwise require multiple operations on the x86 architecture. The x86 measurement attempts to even out these hardware differences. Despite conservative conversions, the GPU and PS3 clients' x86 FLOPS are consistently greater than their native FLOPS and comprise a large majority of Folding@home's measured computing performance.

In 2007 Guinness recognized Folding@home as the most powerful distributed computing network. As of October 20, 2012, the project has 215,312 active CPUs, 20,530 active GPUs, and 17,257 active PS3s, for a total of 3.821 native petaFLOPs (5.586 x86 petaFLOPS). At the same time, the combined efforts of all distributed computing projects under BOINC totals 6.961 petaFLOPS. Using the Markov state model approach, Folding@home achieves strong scaling across its user base and gains a linear speedup for every additional processor. This network allows Folding@home to do work that was previously computationally impractical.

In March 2002 Google co-founder Sergey Brin launched Google Compute as an add-on for the Google Toolbar. Although limited in functionality and scope, it increased participation in Folding@home from 10,000 up to about 30,000 active CPUs. The program ended in October 2005 in favor of the official Folding@home clients, and is no longer available for the Toolbar. Folding@home also gained participants from Genome@home, another distributed computing project from the Pande lab and a sister project to Folding@home. The goal of Genome@home was protein design and associated applications. Following its official conclusion in March 2004, users were asked to donate computing power to Folding@home instead.