I have participated in online computing for a number of projects dating back to the original SETI@home. I was managing a large test lab at MSFT and with my boss' permission, up to 1,000 computers were spending their time processing the telescope data.
This is fascinating - from Anand Tech:
Folding@Home Reaches Exascale: 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second for COVID-19
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.
Ho. Li. Crap. That is a lot of power. Most modest computers will have several "cores" or separate processors housed in one chip sharing a pool of memory and resources. This machine I use for email, surfing, etc... has four cores. Still, they have enrolled 4.63 Million cores. A wonderful use of resources and an outpouring of generosity from computer users everywhere.
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