Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche. Then came COVID-19. //

Then in February, everything changed. Folding@Home suddenly went from 30,000 volunteers running the software in February to 400,000 in March—another 300,000 users came on board after that. There were so many users that the database ran out of potential simulations for them to crunch, and data coming in was so great that the servers were overloaded, said Bowman.

Despite these glitches, F@H zoomed to a peak performance of 1.5 exaFLOPs, making it more than seven times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, Summit, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

What caused this? For starters, interest in finding a therapy for COVID-19 helped. SETI@Home announcing the end of its project on March 31 also meant tens of thousands of people were looking for something new to run on their PCs. But the big boost came March 13, when Nvidia tweeted out a call to arms. //

With just six servers at Washington University and partner sites at Sloan Kettering and Temple University, so much data was coming back and being written to disk that F@H stopped sending out work units. New servers have since helped them catch up. It did put a pause on the F@H team’s main project, a significant rewrite and update of the client app. That’s on hold for now, Bowman said.