Below is the article posted by the Folding@Home Director, Professor Vijay Pande. I thought it was very interesting what this means to the project as a whole. Also, I am excited to hear the results from publications.
November 02, 2007
Thoughts on passing a petaflop
As many of you have heard, we’ve passed a petaflop in performance for FAH. A petaflop is 1 million-billion floating point operations per second, i.e. 10^15 operations per second or 1,000,000,000,000,000. If we gave everyone on the planet a calculator, they would still have to do push over 200,000 buttons a second to keep up. It’s a big number, but what does it mean and what does it get us?

First and foremost, it means that we’ve gotten a great turn out and we really thank all that our donors have done to help us. But what really matters to all of us is not the turn out, but the results. What a petaflop gets us in terms of the results is the ability to use very accurate models and have decent enough statistics to actually say something. Usually in computer simulation, one has to choose one’s “poison”: either a good model but no statistics (i.e. just one or two simulations) or a very simplified model (which may not be accurate enough at all) but with good statistics. Both have major downsides. With a PFLOP, we get to have it both ways — accurate models and the ability to actually say something about it.

We have several new results that have been submitted for publication that I think will show this off, but the unfortunate aspect of peer review is that it takes quite a while to get the paper out. Nevertheless, peer review is a critical part of science and once we’ve passed that stage for this most recent work, I’ll be set to discuss it more publicly — which I’m very, very excited to do.

I ask that you take 10 minutes to download, install, and run the Folding@Home software on your computer(s). If you need help, I’d be happy to help, or you can visit the Folding@Home website. If you would like to join my team, I would be honored! The first time you run the software it will ask for a user name and team number. The user name you enter will be displayed in the stats on the Folding@Home website and if you participate as a member of my team, it will appear there as well.
My team number is 46505.