Victory Lap: Team AnandTech Fights COVID, Beats Tom’s Hardware in Folding Race

Just 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.

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