It's not been that long since we praised the worldwide community for allowing Folding@Home to reach double the performance of the world's top supercomputer, IBM's Summit, which ekes out calculations at the petascale with 200 peak petaFLOPS. However, the world has again shown promise when it comes to people selflessly giving their power and performance for a higher cause. Folding@Home now likely smokes performance metrics of some Tier 1 civilizations out there (in the Kardashev scale, of course, should there be some; I'm cautiously jesting in all regards) with its 1.5 ExaFLOP performance.

As it stands, and should users keep on donating their processing power, it seems the community can even go as far as eclipsing the deployment of the world's most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan, which is only meant to be operational - get this - in 2023. This means we are close to offering equivalent performance for multiple disease research (including COVID-19), today, to that of a currently theoretical supercomputer. Of course, queues are long towards receiving work, so now it's become a problem for researchers to keep this computational power fed with data to crunch - we're actually hitting bottlenecks that supercomputers too have achieved before us.If you want to donate your spare cycles, it's easy: just go to the Folding@Home web page, download the installer for your system of choice, and voila. While you're at it, remember to fold aggregated to the TPU team, if you so wish: we're currently 28# in the world, but have plans for complete world domination. You just have to input 50711 as your team ID. This is a way to donate efforts to cure various diseases affecting humanity that's at the reach of a few computer clicks - and the associated power cost with these computations.