HPC Wire reports

Last week, the Folding@home team reported that they achieved five petaflops of processing power for their popular protein folding research project, which relies on processor cycles contributed by hundreds of thousands of people. That's more processing power than can be found at any single US DOE lab or supercomputing center. What's more, the five teraflops corresponds to real application performance for the project's protein simulation software, so we're not just talking peak hardware performance.

Perhaps even more impressive is that the project crossed the one petaflop mark only 18 months ago, on Sept. 16, 2007. At this rate, they'll hit an exaflop in about five years. But it's doubtful whether the Folders will really be so fortunate. Most of the performance increase over the last year and a half was the result of the GPGPU revolution. In September 2007, the project had a mere 42 teraflops of GPUs working for them. Today that number stands at 3,295 teraflops (3 petaflops). Two thirds of those are NVIDIA GPUs; one third are ATI (AMD) GPUs.