Folding@Home Coronavirus Race, AnandTech vs. Tom’s Hardware: Two Week Check-In
by Ryan Smith on April 3, 2020 1:00 PM EST
As many of us are stuck at home these days and are slowly quickly going mad, a couple of weeks ago we kicked off a race of sorts with our loyal opposition, Tom’s Hardware. Challenging each other to put an end to the very thing that’s keeping us at home – the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 – we have been racing to see which team can contribute the most work towards the Folding@Home project’s coronavirus distributed computing research efforts. The popular project has already passed an exaFLOP per second in compute performance thanks to Team AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware, and numerous other contributors over the world, and there is still much work to be done for its important research tasks.
Meanwhile, as we’re now at just past the half-way point in our four-week race, I wanted to stop and take stock of things. To see how the humble Team Anandech was faring against the boastful brutes that are the Tom’s Hardware team. And after two weeks, it looks like things are coming up great for Team AnandTech.
Since the race started on March 18th, Team AnandTech has generated 2.45 billion points in work for the Folding@Home project. In the same time period, the Tom’s Hardware team has generated a sizable, but not quite as massive 2 billion points of work. This has put Team AnandTech 445 million points ahead of Tom’s Hardware, or to put this in terms of the ongoing rate, Team AnandTech has been turning in 1.2 points’ worth of work for every point that Tom’s Hardware turns in. Which in the big picture, is actually a rather close race.
As such, with two weeks to go, this race is far from over. Our loyal competition could still turn things around, and so Team AnandTech cannot rest on its laurels. That means we still need you! Both to help Team AnandTech cross the finish line, and to hopefully get out of our homes just that much sooner.
So please stop by the AnandTech Distributed Computing forum to see how you can download the Folding@Home client and join Team AnandTech.
Ultimately this race is for fun, but it’s also for a good cause. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a world-changing event, and, along with the immediate medical risks of the virus, the containment measures it requires are intense. The Folding@Home project is working on several simulations to improve humanity’s understanding of the virus and the disease it causes, with a goal of jump-starting new treatments and to bring the virus under control. It’s a worthy cause, as a result I’d like to encourage everyone to take part in what’s left of our race over the next two weeks.
Carousel Image Courtesy of: CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS
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Slash3 - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
I felt the same way (used to fold when the project first started, but stopped for a while). Their website has been updated over the years and now does detail about twenty of the peer reviewed studies that have come directly from the project's data.TheJian - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
I barely visit anandtech, and can't remember the last time I went to tom's (too much mucking around with their front page!). I only come here after reading everywhere else if something is still missing to me. Otherwise, a quick check of the front page weekly to see if news is posted here that isn't elsewhere. Really, I wore out around 660ti article (about when they became an AMD portal site I guess).There is nothing special anymore about either site IMHO. Ryan thinks 4k is the new norm, but nobody uses it and he's still waiting to be right about 1440p being the new enthusiast standard (said that in the 660ti comments section...ROFL, after being forced by me...LOL). Still stupid. 1080p still owns 66% and 1440p under 6% probably still. Can't be bothered to check ATM yet AGAIN. 4k under 2% as usual I'd guess (well under last checked). Wasted time on testing 4k, never mind all the wasted electricity, gpu power (and life) etc thrown at corona crap. Go back to work, or go bankrupt and into a depression (which killed 40K from suicide last time...so get the F back to work!).
Toms died for me when Tom Pabst left after trying to kill Van Smith articles...Toms deserves what it is now after that and bapco BS ~1999-2001 or so IIRC. Fecking idiots. No idea why ANYBODY uses anything from bapco crap after that. They owned the freaking land and domain name before trying to hid it all! No use for anything from them. Google Van Smith slander. Should get an idea of what went on. Whistleblower on bapco/intel cheating etc, time to destroy you, remove your credit etc from articles. Whitewash as mike magee called it. I wonder how much it cost the site? :) Is that why tom left? Forced? Who knows, but it was ugly what they did if not illegal. Removing a guy's name from articles he clearly wrote for ages is ridiculous. They pretend he never worked there today and have for 2 decades now. This site (anandtech) died with Anand himself leaving. Either he sold out (seemed that way before he left really), or whoever took over did.
eek2121 - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
Just because there is a subset of users that want uber high refresh rates at low resolutions in gaming doesn’t mean 4k and similar resolutions aren’t important and/or the norm.Apple, for example, is the largest OEM in the US (excluding phones/tablets!) and the majority of the products they have shipped in (at least) the past 5 years are > 1440p.
I personally rock 2 4K IPS displays and I am a huge gamer, owning over 1,100 titles on steam and more than 3,000 games on PC overall, and that doesn’t count my console collection.
Morawka - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
See those big spikes in the graph? yeah, that was when my machine was running.Longbowgun - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
Both are nothing compared to CureCoin.