Many institutions have been mobilized to combat the new deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that has spread worldwide and has been killed by 22,169 people after being detected in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China. The Folding @ home project, which is a system of volunteers’ personal computers worldwide and simulates protein molecules, gave information about its activities related to COVID-19. According to the data announced by Folding @ home, the total performance of the system has reached 1.5 kentillion (1.500.000.000.000.000.000) operations per second. Folding @ home participants are reported to be doing more than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. These values are about 10 times faster than IBM’s Summit, the fastest supercomputer. Investigates protein targets in coronavirus IBM’s Summit supercomputer has been able to reach 148.6 PetaFlop (1 PetaFLOP = 1 quadrillion process) so far. Folding @ home had to use 4.63 million processor (CPU) cores and about 430,000 graphics processor (GPU) to achieve this huge success. Considering the nature of the distributed computing method, that is, not all processor cores and graphics processors are always online, so the performance of Folding @ home projects varies depending on the suitability of the hardware. Many computational biology and chemistry projects have been launched due to the new coronavirus outbreak. By establishing the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, IBM wants to bring together major supercomputers used by various research institutions and technology companies in the USA to conduct research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling. The total processing speed of supercomputers participating in this consortium is 330 PetaFLOP. Folding @ home is a simulation project that tries to understand protein dynamics to find treatment for various diseases. Lately, it theoretically simulates protein targets that the drug in the new coronavirus may affect.
