Folding @ Home on an ATI graphics card

[NeoGen]

I think nowadays gpu's are RISC processors, and as such they have incredible raw power at what they do. At some point someone thought of using that raw power for more than just pretty graphics, so now gpu's are starting to be used for processing functions much like cpu's.
With a little of engineering the Stanford devs ported their application to be able to run on the limited instructions of the ATI gpu.
(I wonder if the gpu's can be programmed to show graphics at the same time that they're crunching...)

But anyways, gpu crunching is the new rage, because those sweet RISC processors pack an incredible power that is being wasted 99% of the time. (How much of a gpu's power do you think it's being used when you're browsing our team's forums? )

And... word has it that they even beat cpu's at their own game (crunching). :D
(I still need to see some stats comparisons on that...)

[Strongbow]

It's actually nothing to do with RISC, if it was then I'd be crunching with all my SPARC64s instead.

It's all about floating point performance and massively parallel instructions going across at 128bit and higher to do multiple streamed simple task calculations whilst RISC/CISC/EPIC/x86/x64 etc (Cell intentionally not listed) all have to do multiple chores before having a ponder and counting on their fingers (and in Intel's case, a bit of guesswork and then rounding up ;)) and so basically a CPU is limited by it's serial task handling - whether they are in order or out of order doesn't really matter as the CPU still has to serially calculate variable amounts of output per input elements.

The GPU has had no constraints with regards to architecture heritage therefore this market has been able to evolve at a much more optimized rate than the CPU industries. Tapping into all these GPU GFLOPs are the hot topic at the moment and we will see much more mention of doing this during the next few months as it all rapidly matures.

[Brucifer]

okay, but what about the heat? And if this is so cool, how long before the motherboards start coming out with plug-ins for 5 or 6 graphics cards, in addition to maybe 5 or 6 built in on-board gpu's. ?????

Are we looking at a fundamental change in the way the cpu's are going to end up? If one of those ATI's does 4x the completion rate, who needs the e6600's ???

If this is so hot, where's Compaq? Maybe they'll buy it all like they did with the Alpha, so they can kill off the competition! kof kof wheez, har har har cough...........


And where's distributed.net, and berkeley, and........................

and, and, just think, those puppies could just put EON's servers in to the totally maxed out category in a heartbeat........

[NeoGen]

okay, but what about the heat? And if this is so cool, how long before the motherboards start coming out with plug-ins for 5 or 6 graphics cards, in addition to maybe 5 or 6 built in on-board gpu's. ?????

pretty much right now... I don't have the link to it anymore but not long ago I saw a Quad-SLI system being announced on the net. (At an unbelievable price too... lol)

I can see the potential for DC'ing, but I can't figure why would someone buy such a beast to play games... is it more fun to play games at 200 frames per second than at 60?? :p

p.s. - About the heat... well, that and the power consumption will be something that gpu manufacturers will have to start worrying in the near future now that gpu's will also start being used for DC'ing. Currently they're at outrageous levels already... those articles about the new NVidia 8800 say that it "recommends" a 400W power supply... two of them in SLI it's 800W! :shock:

[drezha]

GPU's are a lot focussed on what they do. As such the GPU's are a lot better at what they do.

Converting them to work on stuff other than graphics was fairly hard but now is a bit easier. Because they are so focussed on what they do, they give more omph to the crunching. One X1900 is supposed to be worth 4 CPU's once it's all sorted out.

It completes units in 4x less time.

When F@H finally sort it all out, you'll be able to run CPU alongside the GPU client to make use of it all (currently it's recommended to run only the GPU client on a single core machine)

[daddygeek]

Originally Posted by Brucifer
So is vista the only O/S supporting this? Anything on linux?

No XP is the only supported O/S . Vista is just one of O/S's that im testing.

We will launch with Windows XP (32 bit only) support only due to driver and compiler support issues. In time, we hope to support Linux as well. Macintosh OSX support is much further out, as the compilers and drivers we need are not supported in OSX, and thus we cannot port our code until that has been resolved.

[Big Whiskey]

now thats power
url here--->OS Stats

29 Tflops by 380+ GPU's
171 Tflops by 175,000+ CPU's

1/7 of Tflops generated by .02% of hosts
and these are early numbers
the CPU count is active hosts in the last 50 days
most GPU's joined in the last week(Oct 3rd stats 11 Tflops by 156 GPU's)

with a couple thousand GPU's they can doulbe their flops

[Brucifer]

hmmm... sucking that much juice it won't be long before crunchers will have to build a nukie power plant or two just to be able to crunch with their gpu's...

[drezha]

now thats power
url here--->OS Stats

29 Tflops by 380+ GPU's
171 Tflops by 175,000+ CPU's

1/7 of Tflops generated by .02% of hosts
and these are early numbers
the CPU count is active hosts in the last 50 days
most GPU's joined in the last week(Oct 3rd stats 11 Tflops by 156 GPU's)

with a couple thousand GPU's they can doulbe their flops

The maain reason why they added it ;)

[Brucifer]

And that's why the other serious contenders in the DC project world will be doing the same. You can bet your bottom dollar that the others are watching this like a hawk.