Quote:
Originally Posted by SFOSOK
That kinda makes a little bit more sense but it would seem better to use a few supercomputers or servers. Something meant more for this.
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Check this page out for a FAQ
http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.folding. (and in answer to your question....
Why not just use a supercomputer? Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@Home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer cycles than we do with the Folding@Home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.