Case Study: Folding@home achieves exascale supercomputing for COVID-19 research with Dell Technologies

Folding@home - Customer Case Study

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that needed massive, coordinated compute power to simulate protein dynamics for diseases like COVID‑19. When participation surged in 2020 to over a million volunteer devices, the project faced backend and network challenges; Dell Technologies and other tech partners stepped in to offer infrastructure and support, including VMware (a Dell Technologies company) appliances to simplify deployment of the Folding@home client.

Dell Technologies contributed volunteer processing cycles and deployment tools (such as a VMware vSphere Appliance with the Folding@home client) and helped shore up backend capacity. As a result, the Folding@home network reached roughly 2.4 exaflops at its peak and more than one million contributors, becoming the world’s first exascale computer and enabling large‑scale SARS‑CoV‑2 protein simulations that accelerated research and publications.

Folding@home