Posted on 09/28/2006 11:45:29 PM PDT by soccer_maniac
Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread.
Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).
Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points).
This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the links posted below (or read one of the previous 20+ folding threads)
Thanks for the ping...I hope to have a total of five processors going shortly.
This is a lot of fun, with very little effort, and for a good cause!
did check the site. still wouldn't trust it. I had used the Seti @ home project, since I knew people that worked on it.
I'm rapidly approaching Top 50 for FR. :-) If I knew for sure how to get >8 CPUs registered, I could probably add more.
bumpity...I think I've reached the point I'm going to stay in the rankings.
Folding@Home grew out of Genome@Home, a contemporary of SETI. SETI allowed G@H to use their ideas and some code in the process of building it.
Same group of folks that get together at conferences, only F@H looks for Little Genetic Markers and SETI looks for Little Green Men.
Are you still using SETI?
The current limit is 8 CPUs per system, not per user.
What are you running that has that many SMPs?
But Windows doesn't need to be rebooted very often. </sarcasm>
My second WU was recently completed. Thanks for bringing this worthwile cause to my attention!
Oh, I got the impression that I have to specify a CPU number for each CPU, regardless of which machine it's on. I guess I misunderstood.
I finally hit 100,000 points a few days ago... Now to get to 200,000.
If you're interested in tracking your folding machine(s) over the web, please Freepmail me.
Available features include:
Bump for later read.
Hey, thanks for the new thread and the ping.
I've borged my office 2.8G P4 and my 24hr Average Points is now holding fairly steadily in the low 40's, though I've been as far upscale as the 37th slot.
From my personal experince, for machines in an environment that produces lots of dust -- especially in a home with pets where there's pet hair around -- open up your CPU on at least an annual basis and vacuum the lint and hair out of your heat-sinks. I shut down for an evening to do this on my 2.26G P4; going so far as to remove the heatsinks completely, clean them and reinstall them with fresh thermal transfer grease. You would not believe the difference in performance due to the vast improvement in heat dissipation.
With computers, more so than with nice cars, a clean machine really IS a fast machine.
Self ping
Nope. stopped a few years ago.
What are CPU ?
Please don't discourage people from helping the team with your histrionics. If you don't want to participate, that's fine, obviously. However, there's no reason to scare others off for no reason.
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=6491&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
ATI pioneers new Stream Computing technology Uses processing technology to go beyond graphics, working with leading academic institutions and software developers to build a stream computing ecosystem
MARKHAM, ONTARIO, Sep 29, 2006 (CCNMatthews via COMTEX News Network) -- Today ATI (TSX:ATY)(NASDAQ:ATYT) announced that it is pioneering a new technology known as Stream Computing, that has the potential to dramatically impact almost every sector of the market. Along with leading companies and academic institutions worldwide, ATI is working to build a stream computing ecosystem, one that delivers the performance, applications, software and tools necessary to turn ATI's vision into reality.
Stream computing allows ATI graphics processors (GPUs) to work in concert with today's high-performance, low-latency computer processors (CPUs) to solve complex computational problems. Using stream computing, in simulations today processing of risk assessment models similar to those used by financial institutions' were completed 16 times faster than traditional methods(1), oil and gas companies are seeing seismic model processing increased by more than 20 times(1), and Stanford University is seeing disease research accelerated by as much as 40 times, giving them the ability to process three years worth of research data in just one month(2).
Stream computing makes use of ATI's sophisticated graphics processors (GPUs) that have until now, been used solely to calculate and render millions of pixels onto computer monitors, hundreds of times each second. Stream computing harnesses that tremendous processing power for a wide range of scientific, business and consumer computing applications, providing organizations the ability to process incredible amounts of information in significantly less time.
"ATI processors are some of the most technologically advanced computing architectures on the planet," said Dave Orton, president and CEO, ATI Technologies Inc. "They were designed with more than just graphics in mind, and today we're seeing the initial fruits of those labors with the introduction of our stream computing initiatives. Fortune 1000 companies, leading software developers, and academic institutions are demonstrating today that stream computing is they key to tremendous performance in a number of applications. Today's announcement is part of our vision of becoming a processing powerhouse in the months and years to come - we're beginning to build the stream computing platform today."
"Stream computing is a great representation of the vision of AMD's Torrenza platform strategy - bringing the unique capabilities of two heterogeneous processing solutions together to solve complex problem sets and change the game," said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD. "Combining AMD64 with stream computing from ATI to address specific application workloads will open up new innovation possibilities in markets such as high-performance computing environments. Torrenza-based technologies have the potential to enable information to flow seamlessly between them in order to solve problems in the most cost-effective and timely manner. We see the potential over time for these two processing elements to become even more tightly coupled."
"The raw computational power of these DirectX-based processors is incredible and harnessing those capabilities for general purpose applications makes a lot of sense," said Dean Lester, general manager of the Graphics Platforms Unit, Microsoft Corp. "Stream computing has the potential to positively impact how organizations analyze data by improving the accuracy and efficiency with which critical business decisions are made, as well as enhancing the overall consumer experience by enabling compelling, high-fidelity environments to gamers today. Microsoft is working closely with ATI towards a future where all of our customers can experience the benefits that stream computing has to offer."
"The combined power of ATI processors and Havok FX enables physical realism only dreamed of by today's game designers," said Jeff Yates, vice president, product management, Havok. "Realistic physics is the future of videogames and together we're making it possible. Just as real-time lighting and shadows are standard in today's games, there will come a time when no game is without this level of immersive, true-to-life physics."
ATI's high-end processor today makes use of 48 compute cores that results in an order of magnitude processing speed-up. In certain applications(3), ATI processors perform up to 40 times faster than competing processors. The accelerated processing associated with stream computing has implications for a number of fields now and in the future, as the ecosystem around stream computing matures:
Scientific research - Today ATI's stream computing efforts are helping to save lives by driving life sciences to produce results faster in areas such as disease research, giving organizations the option to do more granular studies in the same amount of time as in the past(4). ATI announced today that Stanford University will make available a new distributed computing application that takes advantage of ATI processors for disease research. In the future, climate research may also benefit from stream computing as analysis of large data sets for storm and hurricane forecasting can be done faster or in more detail, potentially resulting in the issuing of warnings longer in advance of severe weather, and ultimately a better understanding of the world's climate.
Homeland security - Communications analysis and facial recognition can be drastically improved using stream computing, with implications for airport security, as well as photograph and video analysis.
Financial forecasting - Major institutions have been using server farms to do risk assessment using Monte Carlo simulations, and for derivatives pricing using models like Black-Scholes. Simulations conducted by PeakStream, Inc. using ATI hardware shows that stream computing can provide these companies with more detailed answers in significantly less time, letting them make the business decisions they need to faster, and giving them a leg up on their competition.
Oil and gas - Companies are using stream computing to analyze more data in shorter periods of time to more quickly and reliably discover where resources lie, speeding discoveries of crude oil deposits. ATI graphic processors in concert with PeakStream's software platform are allowing oil and gas companies to achieve significantly faster seismic data modeling.
Database searching - For search companies with incredibly large databases to organize and sort through, stream computing may offer a compelling business case providing increased processing power in less space.
Consumer applications - Software used by millions of people around the world, such as operating systems, office applications, and graphics applications, can benefit from stream computing. Any graphics-laden software that requires heavy processing can be accelerated.
Videogames - An area where ATI processors are already heavily used for graphics purposes, working with Havok, premier provider of software and services to interactive digital media creators, stream computing is resulting in life-like modeling of hair, cloth, smoke, liquid, and the physics behind them, giving gamers the most immersive experience possible.
Other areas that stream computing has the potential to impact in the future include enterprise software, product design and manufacturing, and digital media encoding among others.
With this new opportunity, ATI is also announcing a specific focus on enterprise stream computing in an effort to drive commercial adoption of stream computing with the help of its partners. For more information on ATI's stream computing initiatives, please see related company announcements made today on the topics of enterprise stream computing, and Stanford University's Folding@home program. About ATI Technologies ATI Technologies Inc. is a world leader in the design and manufacture of innovative 3D graphics, PC platform technologies and digital media silicon solutions. An industry pioneer since 1985, ATI is the world's foremost graphics processor unit (GPU) provider and is dedicated to deliver leading-edge performance solutions for the full range of PC and Mac desktop and notebook platforms, workstation, set-top and digital television, game console and handheld device markets. With fiscal 2005 revenues of US $2.22 billion, ATI has more than 4,000 employees in the Americas, Europe and Asia. ATI common shares trade on NASDAQ (ATYT) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (ATY).
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WOW A 40X increase in processing time!!
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Congrats to lrenh for hitting the Big 1.0 ... One Million points!
I may add another box this year. (I cancelled the AMD AM2 plans.) I am considering the Intel Core 2 Quad (4-Core) coming out in November. My old node7 is gone (ownership changed) and I wish to build a replacement. node7 is the only Windows box (other than a dual boot laptop) it is used for Video and 3D applications, all of my other boxes are Linux/BSD/UNIX.
I already bought some parts including some software. I love the student prices at universities: WinXP Pro $5, MS Office 2003 Pro Enterprise Edition $0 (Really, 1 free copy per year).
GPUs to increase Folding@Home processing power up to 500x
Wolfgang Gruener and Mark Raby
September 29, 2006 13:03
Palo Alto (CA) - Stanford University's Folding@Home project today announced a new software that will enable the use of graphics cards within the distributed computing project. Project leaders will tap into the floating point horsepower of graphics chips and hope to see a massive jump in processing power that can lead to more research results in less time.
Whenever there is a need of enormous processing power scientist typically make use of, if available, supercomputers. And if supercomputers aren't enough, clusters have been expanded in the past, for example for the SETI@Home ("search for extraterrestrial life") program of the University of California, Berkeley, or the Folding@Home project of Stanford University, to distributed computing projects.
Folding@Home, launched in 2000 by Stanford Associate Professor Vijay Pande, researches the "folding" process of proteins - a term that refers to the assembling and reassembling of proteins. This biological process not always happens in a perfect way and if "proteins get screwed up," said Pande, biomedical problems and diseases can develop - such as Alzheimer's disease, one of Pande's research interests.
Computer simulation of these folding processes can help researchers to learn more about the processes and find cures for or even prevent certain diseases. The problem is that these simulations consume huge amounts of processing power. "This scenario has become a 25-year nightmare," Pande said. Researchers are far away from being able to calculate folding processes in real time: In fact, 1 ns of folding currently takes about 1 day to calculate - or 1 second will take more than 2700 years on "one fast processor," he said.
"Even if the government would give us everything they have in computing power, it wouldn't be enough," he explained. Some simulations could still take up to 40 years to yield some results. Folding@Home was an idea to reach many more machines that would run calculations and, according to Pande, it has been a great success - with more than 200,000 active computers worldwide crunching numbers at this time.
Dual-core processors promised to bring another increase in horsepower, but Pande said that "twice" the performance doesn't cut it: "We need 30 or 40 times the speed to turn months into days," he said.
The project members looked into options to increase the processing speed and ended up at solutions such as Clearspeed's accelerator card, which provides about 100 GFlops or about four times the performance of a current Core 2 Duo chip. But the cards are priced at $5000 even in volume and aren't quite what one would call affordable. Pande now believes to have found a solution by tapping into the capabilities of modern graphics cards, which are monsters in terms of floating point performance: A new client released today supports ATI's X1900 and X1950 graphics cards, which can unleash about 375 GFlops, which is about 20 to 40 times more speed than what the project has seen so far. The group has also improved the software algorithm of Folding@Home, which he expects will bring another 10 - 15x improvement for a total maximum performance increase of about 500x - when ATI's graphics cards are used. However, Pande conceded that the graphics may only be able to deliver a sustained 100 GFlops of speed.
Folding@Home Project
At this time, the beta client is limited to the X1900 series of graphics cards; the researcher said that X1800 cards will be supported soon. The group will also be leveraging the Playstation 3 with its powerful Cell processor. A client for the PS3 was shown already in August, but, according to Pande, that applications for the Cell aren't easy to program.
So, what about Nvidia cards? According to Pande, the group has not been able to get the software to work on Nvidia chips.
Andy Keane, general manager of visualization applications at Nvidia, said in response to the ATI/Stanford announcement that general processing graphics processing units (GPGPUs) so far have been "fundamentally flawed" in a sense that there has not been a lot of "commercial exploitation with GPUs as a processor."
He mentioned that Nvidia wants to change this situation and considers the GPGPU market as "exciting" and something that "the company has been looking at for years." He stated that he had no personal knowledge of the development of a Folding@Home client for the Nvidia platform, but stressed that the company has a "long-standing relationship with Stanford."
At least as far as we know, Nvidia cards were in fact used for general processing projects before ATI came into the picture. One of the early projects was the now defunct BionicFX, which used Geforce 6800 processors to accelerate audio processing. ATI publicly mentioned the possibility of using graphics processors for other applications than graphics shortly before the launch of the X1800 graphics cards series. Such an approach, which ATI called "load balancing" could one day run, for example, physics effects on consumer and enthusiast PCs. Nvidia outlined a similar approach earlier this year for future SLI systems.
However, the fact that graphics chips particularly excel in floating point performance, currently limits the general purpose use of the chips largely to scientific applications. More and more companies are entering this lucrative field and try to answer the need for more processing power. For example, startup Peakstream last week announced an application interface layer that enables developers to add graphics cards to computer systems as a way to create "cheap" supercomputers.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/29/folding_at_home_to_use_gpus/
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