Folding@home gets 15-30 percent performance boos ton NVIDIA GPUs

The Folding@home team announces they've cooperated with NVIDIA to make Folding@home GPU cores compatible with CUDA. Most Folding@home workloads on NVIDIA GPUs should see a 15 to 30 percent performance boost, with some chips seeing even larger increases. Interestingly, performance for COVID Moonshot Sprints, which is used for COVID-19 research, sees a speedup of up to 50-100 percent on many GPUs:

As of today, your folding GPUs just got a big powerup! Thanks to NVIDIA engineers, our Folding@home GPU cores—based on the open source OpenMM toolkit—are now CUDA-enabled, allowing you to run GPU projects significantly faster. Typical GPUs will see 15-30% speedups on most Folding@home projects, drastically increasing both science throughput and points per day (PPD) these GPUs will generate.

Even more exciting is that the COVID Moonshot Sprints—which use special OpenMM features to estimate how tightly potential therapeutics will inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main viral protease—can see speedups up to 50-100% on many GPUs, helping us enormously accelerate our progress toward a cure.