Folding@Home Releases GPU Client

SB_SamuraiSam writes, "Today the Folding@Home Group at Stanford University released a client (download here) that allows participants to fold on their ATI 19xx series R580-core graphics cards. AnandTech reports, 'With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.'"

Comments

good, I think...

[joe 155]

I like the idea of F@H, but I do worry about 1) opening up my computer to security risks and 2)damaging my computer because the processor (or now GPU) is getting hammered by always being accessed.

Are either of my worries vaild? can it damage it (or speed up its death) and what's the probability of a security threat?

Re:good, I think...

[Aladrin]

Yes, it'll be 'good enough' 10 years from now, as long as you don't plan to do any more then than you do today. Don't buy any more hardware or software and hope to hell you have no problems.

Face it, computers are one of the fastest changing technologies. Intel plans to have some ridiculous hardware in only 5 years. 80 core CPUs? Crazy. If you think your current dusl dual-core setup (I'm assuming you have the best PC possible to back up that 10 yr statement) will be able to handle what an 80-core doesn't blink at, you're crazy. It's going to have approx 20 times the power, assuming no other advances in speed.

No, that logic works great for cars and toasters, but computers just change too much.

Re:good, I think...

[Prosthetic_Lips]

If my computer is good enough today, it should be good enough 10 years from now.

I hope I just missed your <sarcasm> ... </sarcasm> tags.

Ever hear of Moore's Law?

wikipedia: Moore's Law

Transistor density has been doubling every 24 months (I recall it being quoted as 18 months, but we would be arguing semantics) for as long as I can remember. In 10 years, that's 2**5, or 32 times denser than it is right now. And you think the computer you have now will run anything remotely close to what is running then? You won't even be able to load the operating system.

Think back 10 years ago (1996), what was the "hot computer" filled with? The original Pentium, probably running at a blazing 66MHz?

Next let's quote Bill Gates, "640K should be enough for anyone."

Re:Power usage?

[jeffs72]

Or heat for that matter. My geforce 7900 raises my box temp by 4 degrees C just doing 2d windows xp desktop work. I can't imagine running a gpu at 100% and cpu at 100% for hours on end. Better have good cooling. (granted mine does suck, but stuff).

Two words: closed architecture

[J.R. Random]

"With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results."

And therein lies the rub. While GPU's are getting more and more like general purpose vector floating point units, they remain closed architectures, unlike CPUs. Only those that can get help from ATI (or Nvidia) need apply to this game.

Re:Folding@home versus Grid.org

[Matt Perry]

It seems that folding@home is not directly working on producing a cure and they are focusing on understanding "how" something happens.

Understanding how something does or doesn't work is the first step to fixing things. Maybe what is learned by Folding@Home can be applied to solve problems in other areas like cancer.

Re:Wouldn't this be folding at single precision on

[Anonymous Coward]

I would probably be using fixed point, as it's fairly precise.

"Fairly"?

Re:Folding@home versus Grid.org

[Gumber]

Dude, as basic reasearch goes, gaining a better understanding protein folding has a huge number of applications, including, I dare say, finding a cure for cancer.

Security Risk? Nope, much safer than games

[billstewart]

Folding@Home and similar projects aren't a security risk, as long as they're from trustable sources. They're certainly far safer than the closed-source game software that was the reason you bought a high-end 3-d accelerated video card in the first place. I'd prefer to see projects like that being open-source (at least in the sense of "you can read the source and do anything you want with it", as opposed to the stricter "accepts changes back from the community" part of the model.)

Most of the distributed-computation projects have a very simple communication model - use HTTP to download a chunk of numbers that need crunching, crunch on them for a long time, and use HTTP (PUT or equivalent) to upload the results for that chunk, etc. Works fine through a corporate firewall, and the only significant tracking it's doing is to keep track of the chunks you've worked on for speed/reliability predictions and for the social-network team karma that helps attract participants.

Online games normally have a much more complex communications model - you've got real-time issues, they often want their own holes punched in firewalls, there's user-to-user communication, some of which may involve arbitrary file transfer, and many of the games are effectively a peer-to-peer application server as opposed to the simple client-server model that distributed-computation runs. Fortunately, gamers would never use third-party add-on software to hack their game performance, or share audited-for-malware-safety programs with their buddies, or "share" malware with their rivals, or run DOS or DDOS attacks against other gamers that pissed them off for some reason.....

As far as the effects of running a CPU or GPU at high utilization go, most big problems will show up as temperature, though there may be some subtle effects like RAM-hogging number-crunchers causing your system to page out to disk more often. Not usually a big worry if you're running a temperature monitor to make sure your machine doesn't overheat. Laptop batteries are an entirely separate problem - you really really don't want to be running this sort of application on a laptop on battery power. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when I was commuting by train, and not only did it suck down battery, the extra discharge/recharge cycles really beat up a couple of rounds of NiMH battery packs. Oh - you're also contributing to Global Warming and to the Heat Death of the Universe. But finding cures for major diseases is certainly a reasonable tradeoff, and we'll do that faster if you're using your GPU as opposed to 10 people using general-purpose CPUs.

Re:Probably poor QC

[deroby]

"Some" years back I was temporarily assigned to a 'smallish' company that had around 120 PC's (Pentium 200 MMX, 98MB RAM, NT4) on the network. While talking to the admin about the Distributed.Net project he got interested in it too and after a couple of days of succesfully running the client on a the admins computers, we rolled it out overnight to all pc's on the network. The local distributed.net proxy we set up reported plenty of activity and we were looking forward to a nice spike in my statistics. Instead we (well, at first only the admin =) were called down the next morning to have a look at some secretary's pc that had started blue-screening and eventually had broken down completely. Same story repeated itself about 5 times and it soon became clear that the affected pc's all were 'killed' by the distributed.net client. After opening up some of them, the reason soon proved to be poor ventilation (read : the box was completely clogged up with dust & hair & yuckness and the little CPU-fan obviously had stopped turning years before...), leaving a charred cpu under the stress of 100% load for hours at a time).

We uninstalled the client soon after that, as the number of 'spare-pc's was quickly running out =)

The 'peak' clearly registered, but sadly didn't last long. Ahh, the days =)

Anyway, what I wanted to say was : although ALL the pc's were identical and more less the same age, some were perfectly capable of running 100% load 24/7, others weren't. In this case it was mainly due to maintenance (or lack thereof). But I'm sure things like ambient temperature, location (eg. hidden in a closed corner under your desk), environment (eg. furry creatures hugging the box all the time) etc... can have a much more serious effect on the hardware than the labratory-tests they do during "QC" when the machine leaves the factory.