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PS3 Client for Folding@Home Debuts, ATI GPU Version Soon
eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS."
Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.
Nice news. I'm sure Sony will make lots of PR capital out of this ala the subject ;)
Will this run on PS3 Linux or natively on the regular OS?
That's like... 10,000,000,000,000,000 instances of taxpayers dollars being wasted! How many more times does this have to flop before it's canceled?
Imagine what would happen if they could also harness Diebold's flops...
Donate free food here
x86 continues to get left in the computational dust.
I have a friend who is a very senior engineer at NVidia who has talked about how sick and tired they are of having the boat anchor that is x86 tied to their hardware. And that they would love to just cut out Intel and just run Windows/Linux right on their hardware. Microsoft obviously felt the same way when they dumped Intel and switch to PowerPC with the 360.
The PS3 is supposed to completely support keyboard and mouse, have a full version of Linux sitting on the harddrive, and support homebrew development. If you can download and install normal Linux apps...a graphics programmer dream come true. Even cooler are the plans of Sony coming out with higher end PS3 models with more RAM or Cell chips. A Linux box with a couple gigs of RAM and dual or quad Cells, oh baby.
You are so right! Don't you just hate how these manufactures show up at owners houses and put a gun to their heads and force them to run computationally expensive apps on their hardware!
Ohhhh!!! Makes me sooooo mad!!!! Someone mod me up!!!
Oh wait, they don't...
For projects like F@H, which are doing important research that might help cure disease, perhaps the government should offer tax credits based on how many units one puts out? It *does* cost money, which is precisely why SETI pioneered the idea. Low funding levels coupled with the need for supercomputing like capabilities. In essence *any* distributed computing project distributes not only the computational work, but the expense as well.
There aren't much details on the ATI version. I'm guessing there's no Nvidia version yet because of the lack of IEEE 854 compliance in viedo cards, so they'd have to create a special version for each video card. But it's pretty neat what you can do with video cards these days besides play video games.
Yeah only this isn't SETI@home... read a little bit... $300 donated to cancer research is a little less "silly" don't you think?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
It's more like you buy $300 worth of coal every year and burn it with no particular result. :)
I use nuclear-power electricity
Most people just don't consider the cost. OP never said anyone was forced into it, but then again we all know you're trolling.
The Cell processor is vastly superior to the "Emotion Engine" and yet, Sony doesn't seem concerned that it'll be used to build supercomputer networks by menacing countries...
;)
sarcasm here, please...
I don't feel like it...
The Broadband Engine in the PS3 has roughly 210 Gflops of power at 3.2Ghz. That is around an order of magnitude more than most people's current Intel desktop PCs. Although that isn't really the full story since it is the memory architecture that makes Cell chips so much more powerful than Intel chips, but that is a whole other, very cool, subject. If even a small percentage of the 100+ million PS3s Sony will sell over the next five years are added to computation pool, the results will be staggering.
if I had points I would mod you +1 insightful.
Carry on.
Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable.
Gee, that's much better (and completely different) than when Saddam was supposedly using playstation 2's to test nuclear weapons. This isn't a planted story by Sony *at all*.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Much though I like SETI, I have to agree. Every consumer device, including PCs for home & office should be default be set to save as much power as possible. That means the operating system should stick devices in standby if they're idle and ultimately hibernate them. I believe Vista will do this and not before time. The amount of power wasted by empty offices filled with computers & monitors left on all night must be obscene.
That's why you should run it in during winter; saves (somewhat) on the heating bill.
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I'll bet you a million bucks the ps3 has something similar to what tivo uses..
in fact i'll bet you one of the coprocessors on the cell is just like microsoft's custom xbox360 processor, with on-die signing and encryption keys.
Yeah, it'll run linux.. a "signed" distribution of linux which will be the only thing ps3 will run.
why do you think Sony announced it rather than the folding@home coordinators at stanford?
Sony probably only offered the signature because the project submitted everything and assured sony they'd happily stay right under their proprietary lockin thumbs.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Not as silly as if the $300 donated to cancer research was caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research to prevent cancer caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research.
:)
I HATE SILLY LOOPS
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
You're right; everyone knows you have to use BogoMIPS for an accurate comparison!
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
As a person that does research on proteins, having better algorithms for protein folding would be a god send. . You have no idea how much time and effort is wasted on designing and expressing protein constructs that have no chance of folding properly. What we currently use for design (Tango, FoldIndex, PONDR, DisEMBL) is still inadequate. $300 may sound like a lot of money, but it is nothing compared to the cost of research.
"SETI pioneered the idea" ???
http://www.distributed.net/ was doing it long befor seti@home
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Maybe you should just donate the fucking money (there is your tax reduction) and allow them to build a nice custom computer that will be much faster and better for the workload than those ugly hacks of clients that spend more time for fancy interface and screensavers and communication lag than they actually do something useful?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
if you had a PS3 would you run this in down time?
I'm running folding@home at 2 PCs that runs all night (using electric power at night is more cheap than during the daytime). And it's installed on other 3 PCs, so when I'm only browsing the Internet or so, it uses the unused processor.
So if I buy a PS3, or a Cell personal computer, I'm sure that it is going to run folding@home.
My city: Barcelona.
No matter what the cause, it's still important to consider the costs and the benefits of running it.
Even if we assume that most people know about the extra power cost and are willing to pay that, is it an efficient use of the money in terms of getting results? Would it be better if people donated the money instead?
You are correct for the most part however not everyone pays their electric bill directly.
For my apartment I pay a single amount for everything, the space, water, gas, electricity, sewer, trash, etc.
So when I am running 20,000 BTU's of cooling power between two separate AC's, 6 PC's on 24/7 (4 of which do Seti@home) and take 20 minute showers... I come out pretty good and considering the person who had the place before me didn't have their rent raised in the 10 years they were there.
Of course... all of this can change at any point as mine is a month to month lease, so should it change I might worry, but until then I'll just keep on chugging.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Somehow I don't think Sony will be too pleased to have the PS3's success measured in flops ;)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Full disclosure: I work on both of those projects.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
You're too full of shit for him to reply in full. It'd take all day.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
I haven't been following things too closely, but has Nintendo made any moves to make a dev kit available that non-commercial developers can use? If so it would be cool if a version for the Wii could be made for this project.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You must be thinking of SETI@Home. That is useless.
Folding@Home does actual science. Thumbs up for those guys!
--cyphertoxin
I would assume whoever wants the massive computation is willing to pay a notable amount to anyone who allows their PS3 to be hooked up to it for a signficant time per month. Perhaps Sony could remind people of the money they "get back" after the high price?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
when little Jonny's monther made him turn off his game and come upstairs for dinner.
Oh well.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Ah you are right. I should have recalled the proper chronology since I used to run both, years ago. My bad.
...you're only paying a fixed price per month for your electricity, so it's *just fine* for you to waste as much as you want. Screw the environment, screw the costs you're passing on to others - both financial and ecological. It's not coming out of your wallet, so fuck the World.
Tell me, do you set US foreign policy?
Now you can use it for both!
"I forgot my mantra."
This is what I get for browsing at -1....
No, the cost of the computing cycles is worth more than the money to pure research. It may not be efficient, but the cost (both dollar and environmental) to buy/manufacture the processors and run them would be far greater than just running existing processors. Yes, there's the inherent inefficiency of distributed computing, but there is also sever inefficency in the process of donating, adminstrating, allocating, purchasing, monitoring, and replacing physical assets.
Put another way, is it cheaper to identify, buy, assemble, build, maintain, and power a computer, or is it cheaper to just power the computer, even if the power-Flop ratio might only be 1:0.5. Buildings and people are expensive when compared to energy costs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
love your sig.
Be seeing you...
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
then only thing tat Seti ever did was make it show a neet chards as the screen saver..
i still laugh that distributed.net managed to get to the end of the keyspace for rc5-64 then realized they had the correct key 6 months prior, but no one noticed
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Yes, of course the cost of buying processors is more than running existing processors.
My point, however, wasn't to compare costs of running existing processors to buying new ones, it was to say that the money might be better spent on other areas of cancer research (i.e. other than Folding@Home). If I'm going to give $300 (in either power or monetary donation) to cancer research, I'd want it to go to the best avenue of research - and I have no idea if this is 'Folding@Home' or not.
As a long time Folding At Home contributor, I found the following statement to be incorrect:
"Total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS."
The fastest supercomputer in the world is IBM's Blue Gene/L, which clocks in at 280.6 teraflops http://www.top500.org/. The distributed network of Folding at Home is currently 171.2 teraflops http://folding.stanford.edu/stats.html/ as measured by sustained contributions from active members. The Folding At Home network is already the second most powerful, if ranked by the Top 500 list criteria. At any range from 1-10 petaflops, the Folding at Home network would be more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
Yeah, but it's hell in the summer time. I had to buy a window air conditioner (I have central AC) for my home office. It used to get up to 95F in there.
I wonder what the power consumption is for the PS3? I hear the xbox draws 160 Watts alone, double the amount of the original xbox.
How many Flops is a Beowulf Cluster of Alaskan Diebold machines...?
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
But can you fly around the molecules by waving the controller around like you're flying a futuristic aircraft?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Darn right.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
That's the sound of all those NDA's being lifted.
;)
Only about 150 still in effect now.
Wait till you see what's next
.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
But F@H is, MAYBE $300, over the course of a whole year. Tiny slices added to your power bill. That's much easier to deal with than a lump sum of a $300 donation at one time.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think it would be cool if Windows' screensaver were programmed to automatically join this thing, no matter which screensaver the user chose. That way, there would be zillions and zillions of petaflops available to this process, without having to do anything special to achieve it.
How nearsighted of them ;) No support for PPC64 at all? I even tried building Wine on an 8-way POWER5 machine to run the Windows 32-bit binary under, and that didn't work either.
So how about it? When will we see a PPC/PPC64 Linux binary of Folding@Home? Where is the source, Luke? I'll build it myself!
Spoken like a true ignorant American who doesn't know shit about the rest of the world, or, indeed, about the politics of the United States itself.
The entire planet opposed us for a reason, or rather, many reasons. Even the countries that "supported" us, did so against the wishes of the majority of their respective populations, and only to win our favor.
Just look at the disaster we've created in Iraq. All we've done is destroy infrastructure, further damaging the quality of life of Iraqis, and even worse, removed the keystone preventing civil war -- yes, Saddam Hussein and his government, our former ally. Oh... and built an oil pipeline...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Also, it would probably be too expensive for the IRS to implement, unless the administrative overhead involved with tracking, verifying, etc can be shunted off onto someone else (F@H).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you're going to run it anyhow, yes, do it in the winter instead of the summer, otherwise you'll be using twice the electricity, thanks to air conditioning.
However, don't think you're not paying anything for it in the winter. Electric heating is much more expensive, and much less effecient than burning gas/oil/wood/etc. And, running something with a switching power supply is much less effecient than using a fully-resistive electric heater of the same power.
AND if you are using electric to heat your home, you should really switch to ground/water-source (geothermal) heat pumps, and use a fraction as much energy.
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For no reason other than because I'm evil, I present to everyone the following back-of-the-napkin/sources-from-wikipedia analysis:
There was an article a while back about game console power consumption, but rather than dig that up, I'll assume a PS3 will average 200 Watts while cranking away on proteins. It's a good, round number. And I'll assume that I'd spend an hour per day actually playing games. Electricity in my area costs about $0.08/kW-hr.
0.2 kW * 23 hr/day * 365 day/year = 1679 kW-hours/year
1679 kW-hr/year * $0.08/kW-hr = $134.32/year for electricity to fold imaginary proteins. Ouch.
And for those worried about C02, 1679 kW-hr is 6,044,400 kJ, which is the energy equivalent to 46 gallons of gasoline (efficiency of conversion not accounted for). Alternately, assuming your electricity comes from a natural gas (CH4 ~ 891 kJ/mol) plant operating at 40% efficiency, one year of folding on your PS3 would release 746 pounds of CO2 (plus 1220 pounds of water vapor).
Gee, aren't numbers fun? In the fight to cure cancer, you actually end up breaking the bank and destroying the planet. That sucks.
I probably really shouldn't have posted that. I'm going to give all the idealistic, penny-pinching, obsessive-compulsive, environmentalist slashdot readers a complex.
running something with a switching power supply is much less effecient than using a fully-resistive electric heater of the same power.
Really? Where, exactly, is the wasted energy going?
I call [b]BS[/b]! (well for at least 99% of the cases). First: Most computers do not have that power envelope (100watt idle cpu use, 300watt max cpu use), not even close. Perhaps for some hugely OCed P4 or similar... An X2 running at 2.4GHz (i.e. X2-4600+) consumes only 45 watts more at max CPU use (both cores working at 100% cpu use) than at idle. The AMD X2 EEs and the Intel Core and Core 2 consume even less. This is power from the wall, so includes inefficiencies of the PSU. Second: The power used converts mostly to heat. In the cooler months, this brings down the actual cost by a huge margin (from 50% to 90% depending on the primary heat source used) less as it offsets other heating sources. BUT: if also using the X1900XT for number crunching (folding@home), there is an additional power use. As the details are not yet mentioned, just how much additional power use is yet unknown. This is an option for the user (when the client is made available) and they can choose not to have the GPU crunching. But even then, it won't get close (TechReport recent article mentioned just over 100 watts, but that seems to be for both the CPU and graphics card). There is no need to change your computing habits with Folding@Home. It resides in background and you can set what level of max cpu idle use you want it to use (I usually suggest 80%). Turn on & off the computer when you want (it won't lose data). Keeping the computer on just to run Folding@Home is much more expensive (as the difference is between standy (e.g. 10 watts) and full use (e.g. 150 watts)). Many people only bother leaving their computer extra long for folding@home during the cooler months so again significantly reducing the cost (after deducting the useful heating).
Up the power distribution system, actually. That requires power companies to maintain HUGE banks of capacitors.
If you're interested, do a bit of research on Power Factor.
While a fully-resistive load like an traditional lightbulb and an electric heater will have a PF of 1.0 (~100%), cheap switching power supplies are as low as PF 0.4 (~40%).
Switching PSUs in computers are usually closer to 0.6, though the very effecient with active Power-Factor-Correction (PFC) like Seasonic, get as high as 0.9+.
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Do anybody know the actual power consumption when CELL is running at full speed and normal working speed (if it exist and is not full speed)? While grid computing is definitely an attractive idea, running this on PS3 means it runs on the background when you are gaming/watching, and on the foreground when you rest? Considering the electricity consumption of XBox 360, PS3 is not likely to be much more power-saving. People around me won't like to see such a heat-emitting and perhaps whining monster turned on from dawn till dawn.
US$0.15/kW-hour (my local power rates)
n /ewi_sheet23-24.pdf
Ouch! I can Fold at night (7pm-7am) for only $0.03826kWh.
http://www.we-energies.com/pdfs/etariffs/wisconsi
You should check with your utility to see if they offer a Time of Use plan.
Differential pricing for peak and off peak electricity is fairly common here in the UK. It is called Economy 7 because we get 7 hours of cheaper electricity overnight. I pay 8.77p/KWh in the day but only 3.6p/KWh at night. Most installations of this type use the off peak electricity to heat up night storage heaters and hot water tanks.
Night storage heaters are particularly crap because you have to know in advance what the weather will do. If you turn it off overnight and the weather is cold the next day then you have to use expensive electricity to stay warm. If you leave it on and the weather is warm, you roast and there is nothing you can do about it. Storage heaters often make the bedroom too hot overnight but that is necessary in order to have heat the following evening.
A latent existence
I think submitter is a folding@home user like me and wanted to share these great news with Slashdot "technical community".
4 9
You see the result as half of the posters say PS3 has a bad performance and other half says folding@home, a scientific project is sort of "fake" thing.
Please don't "share" any folding@home news with this user profile from now on.
As folding@home is a scientific computation , if people get wrong impression from these "know everything" geeks they will simply delete folding@home. That _is_ a problem. Folding@home sends and reserves a data to a single machine and expect it e.g. 80 days later. If the user gets that data, nobody touches that data until it expires. So there can't be a worse thing to do against that project unless you start DOS attack to Stanford servers.
Lets make it more clear. Here is one of proteins in my quad G5 machine gets computed while I write this message.
" issue: Wed Aug 16 14:54:13 2006; begin: Wed Aug 16 14:54:17 2006
expect: Sat Aug 26 00:56:54 2006; due: Thu Nov 30 13:54:17 2006 (106 days)"
"p2128_ww2128"
So, if I am end user who gets folding@home and doesn't know how project works, I see couple of geeks saying it is a bad, useless thing, I uninstall folding@home yes? That portion of data BELONGS to my computer and there is no way Stanford will figure until 106 days. Another guy could be folding it.
An article discussing seti@home and if it is needed on WSJ has made to slashdot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/28/05562
Of course, there were AC posting like "I am in medical industry, nobody needs a thing like this" and Doctor Vijay Pande had to "reply" using Stanford forums giving up his real work to reply some fake medical worker. I believe because of that +5 interesting AC post (yes, a while!) many people uninstalled folding@home really wasting work units AND the CPU time they spent so far.
Other real scientists had to spare their time to massively stupid predictions like "IP will be locked for 70 years" too.
It is NOT a game, it is not sort of FAKE thing, people of Stanford and GROMACS like organisations spare thousands of hours of professional work and users donate their IDLE cpu time to project which has impact on REAL science and REAL medical work.
I really don't care if you hate PS3 processor or memory architecture, just stay hell out of hurting a scientific project running for years. We (folding community) really don't need your types watts or processor power at all.
BTW same applies to BOINC etc too.
1) The whole thread is not about having an OS running ON a bare naked GPU, but the fact that modern GPU are massive and parallel floating-point units that could be harnessed to do wonderful specialised calculation (things that can be parallelized without too much precision needed, some thing that some BOINC projects like Folding @ home to nicely), and on the other hand nVidia complaining that while they have all this interesting opportunities, they are forced, due to market share, to spend most of their time supporting a brainfucking stupid OS (most of the recent Windows version that still needs GPU drivers) legacy ridden architecture (x86. Even recent chips like the Pentium4 and the Core are still backward compatible with the tiny-winy number of registers the banked memory model and some BCD (maths in base 10) of the original 8088/8087. At least, more of the legacy is now handled in microcode (register renaming) and newer architecture like AMD64 got some of those stupidity removed, specially when running in 64 mode. That's also one of the main reason why the Itanic failed : every one is tied to this old crap architecture, and though crappy it is nobody could suddenly switch to some other more modern architecture. Even if nVidia would like to spend more time with more custom tailored achitecture ).
2) We don't speak about architecture related restriction, but about market share. Most of the company have to spend most of the work time supporting the main dog (Windows on Intel). Yes, we know that you could plus those card into anything with a PCI, an AGP, or an Express connecter. But how many people are pluging those cards into a sparc ? Not many. Windows is still the main market that must be supported (because of the huge amount of gamers that stay there) and the linux users and/or exotic hardware user have just no luck. (And that, coupled with the lack of collaboration from both ATI and nVidia to develop good open-source drivers makes me angry. nVidia users are out of luck for OSS 3D, ATI must rely on reverse-enginered stuff ).
3) Cell for your information, the Cell processor includes a bunch of highly specialised co-processors (dedicated hardware good for vector and floating-point) NEXT to a general purpose CPU Unit (PowerPC based, as far as I know). The CPU parts runs the OS, the cells only serves the dedicated math tasks. Think of it exactly like what is done with GPUs-turned-into-general-purpose-math-units, or the different (programmable) physics engine, etc... the cell are just here to offer a programmable vector/flop facility to the software running on the PowerPC part.
On the other hand given the crap that was able to run OS (xx-DOSes on 8088) some primitive OS *may* be ran on the cell part...
4) Microsoft switched from x86 to PPC, because it's their frickin' hardware, where they control everything and are free to choose whatever solution they want, because the consumer buys a 'XBox', he doesn't care if there's a "Intel Inside" or "powered by Windows" (...of in case of DreamCast : "compatible with Windows" for the few applications that did use it). The PPC switch gave them opportunities they found interesting (less knowledge around hackers, so they hoped slower breakin in. custom built hardware meant getting free of legacy x86 architecture that still somewhat plagued the XBox 1), etc... Although the x86 for the XBox 1 was a logical move : for a company that mostly works with Windows PC, making a gaming console that is basically a customized Windows running on a simplified PC both has an easier learning curve and is cheaper to produce (due to the high availability of PC hardware around). Basically XBox 1 was an experiment in the console field using a PC with "XBox" written on it, were as XBox 360 is more trying to develop in complete freedom a gennuine console architecture.
Apple on the other hand switched specifically to Intel for mostly a marketing reason : the computers today are a commodity, and Apple is trying to attention span from,
- people
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You've heard of conservation of energy, I'm sure (I hope). Here's a new one: Conservation of Money.
Anything that requires power companies to spend more money is going to be reflected by higher (flat) power-rates for YOU. The money for massive power factor correction facilities isn't going to come from the sky, and commercial power companies aren't going to take that money out of their own profits.
Besides, even though home users don't pay for their overall Power Factor, commercial power users (companies) certainly do.
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