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Re:Simulation of a 2B-atom cell that metabolizes and grows l... by drsnow on Friday January 28, 2022 @11:54PM (#30123906)
How on Earth? I can't imagine the difference between the computational power of all top 500 supercomputers is THAT many orders of magnitude far off from the computational power of all the folding@home computational power donated by the general public.
Re:Simulation of a 2B-atom cell that metabolizes and grows l... by dekhn on Saturday January 29, 2022 @10:28AM (#30127044)
supercomputers are specialized products with fast networking to enable real-time updates between nodes. The total node count is limited by the cost of the interconnect to get near-peak performance. You typically run one very large simulation for a long period of simulation time. folding@home doesn't have the luxury of fast networks, jut lots of CPU/GPU. They run many smaller simulations for shorter times, then collect the results and do stats on them.

I looked at the various approaches and sided with folding@home. At one point I had 1 million fast CPU cores running gromacs.

Re:Simulation of a 2B-atom cell that metabolizes and grows l... by CorrectHorseBat on Saturday January 29, 2022 @07:43AM (#30125821)
It's not, foldingathome doesn't do those calculations either but uses a simplified model too.