Victory Lap: Team AnandTech Fights COVID, Beats Tom’s Hardware in Folding Race
by Ryan Smith on April 16, 2020 10:00 AM ESTJust under a month ago, I put out the call: AnandTech's readers were needed once more to defend the honor of the site in the most nerdy of contests: a Folding@Home race.
The distributed computing platform has been around for over a decade now, and it has taken on a new life as the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has shut down a significant part of society. In light of the now global pandemic, the project has turned its eyes to trying to simulate the virus and potential treatment avenues for it, in order to hopefully speed up the development of a cure. A task that has been met with great enthusiasm from the public, as the combined power of the Folding@Home project has recently surpassed 2.4 ExaFLOPS, making it over an order of magnitude more powerful than any supercomputer in the world.
Overall, the project’s coronavirus research has come not a moment too soon, as many of us find ourselves essentially confined to our homes. And, after more than a month of this, we’re all starting to go more than a little mad. So mad, in fact, that AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware agreed to race each other over a four week period to see who could contribute the most to the Folding@Home project.
Those four weeks are finally up, and I am proud to report that Team AnandTech has emerged victorious, defeating our loyal opposition by over a billion points. It was, perhaps, never too close of a race, but I also know that the Tom’s Hardware readership (and its leadership) is never one to underestimated. So while Team AnandTech can take this moment to enjoy a victory lap in defeating its favorite punching bag for the third time in a row, it was a hard-fought race on both sides, and ultimately it all went to a good cause.
Folding@Home Race Results | |||
Team | Points | ||
Team AnandTech | 5,513,255,966 | ||
Tom's Hardware | 4,419,576,007 |
As always, I’d like to thank the AnandTech readers who chipped in to help with this race, as well as the Team AnandTech members who supplied their own computing power, as well as contributing to the stats tracking and other functions needed to host a proper race. To say that AnandTech couldn’t have done it without all of you is an understatement, and this is ultimately your victory.
Meanwhile, although we’re still not out of our home quite yet, hopefully the combined 9.9 billion points worth of work completed by Team AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware gets us one step closer to developing effective treatments for COVID, and getting everything at least a little bit back to normal.
Carousel Image Courtesy of: CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS
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sandytheguy - Saturday, April 18, 2020 - link
How do you force work units?ballsystemlord - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
Hooray! Clap clap clap.Assimilator1 - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
Good job by both teams! :)3dgaming - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
spelling error - a significant party of society. Please deleteonly1jv - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
you got 19+million from me when the call to arms against Tom's Hardware was made.KPOM - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
Congrats to both teams! And no need to stop. The virus is still with us, so let's keep folding.On a side note, I just have some basic MacBooks, so I didn't have a GPU to contribute. That said, I had a continuous supply of CPU-based working units for the entire time. Lower credit, to be sure, but hopefully it still helps the researchers.
soresu - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link
Bonus point is everybody wins regardless of who loses the FOLDING pissing content.....mode_13h - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link
Besides compute, you can also donate $$$ to F@H.https://foldingathome.org/about/donate/
mode_13h - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link
I did, and my employer matched it.Niels Grove - Sunday, April 26, 2020 - link
That is one way to measure the contribution to a vital cause. But how many Folding@Home servers is Anandtech hosting to support the flow of protein foldings?