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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.'"
Anybody got an idea of what kind of power constant full speed GPU calculations are likely to burn?
the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.
Yeah, but what kind of results do you get if you combine the GPU-accelerated client with a KillerNIC video card? It must at least triple the speed. at least.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Looks like a good use of my ATI card when I'm not gaming or Google Earthing under Linux. Sweeeet!
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
IMHO, the work the oxford university/grid .org cancer project is more important than understanding folding. It seems that folding@home is not directly working on producing a cure and they are focusing on understanding "how" something happens.
..but I see the oxford univ. as having the most immediate and long term benefit. And iIt's a shame that project receives no publicity.
.. as cpu's get faster .. a delay would have negligible impact to the overall length of time taken. However working on directly on cures for common cancers has a more immediate benefit.
Check out http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html and decide for yourself. Personally, I don't see direct value/benefit to the folding@home project. I understand that knowing about misfolding is important for certain diseases and maybe even cancers
Since the "time to a cure" by understanding protein is very long term
"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.
Since we're dealing with measurements (or at least simulated measurements) of the real world, the numbers are always going to be inaccurate. Even in fixed point, errors accumulate. They just accumulate in different ways.
One problem with floating point is that it risks being unrepeatable. If you don't carefully define the terms of rounding, you'll have two different machines arrive at different results on the same calculation. But as long as you pick a standard (e.g. IEEE 754), your results are repeatable. Not any more accurate, but repeatability can be important, too, when you're dealing with potentially chaotic systems.
Now, if the GPU hardware doesn't inherently support your rounding standard you'll have a hard time getting repeatable answers out of it. You can compensate but it's a pain in the nuts, and it undoes a lot of the advantage of having your math engine in hardware.
Precision is purely a matter of the number of bits you throw at the problem. Fixed point is not inherently more precise; in fact, if the numbers you're working with aren't in the middle of the range of your chosen fixed point it'll be wildly imprecise.
They may well want to use integer operations rather than floating point or fixed point. When you can redesign your operations for integer arithmetic, you get repeatable results and the operations are very, very fast. But integers can be very imprecise, for the same reason fixed-point operations are.
Not all the power gets dissipated as heat. Some gets sent down the Internet tubes.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
- SSE vectors are 128 bits -- that's two doubles, not eight. [There may be 8 sse registers, but that doesn't mean you can do 8 simultanous sse operations.]
- It's possible to extend precision using single-single "native pair" arithmetic. There's a paper by Dietz et al on GPGPU.org that discusses this.
This doesn't make GPUs capable of double-precision arithmetic, and doesn't mean they will replace CPUs. But it can be used expand the number of algorithms where the vast "arithmetic density advantage" of GPUs can be applied. Top-end CPUs can do 20-30 single-precision GFLOPS, GPUs have about 10x more GFLOPs in the fragment shader ALUs. That's alot of power if you can figure out how to make it work for your problem.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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Precisely.
Is there any way I can use this to make my next graphics card purchase tax deductable?
They're studying the folds of protiens. All protiens are made of chains of amino acids, but usually more than one chain, and they're folded and twisted in a precise way in order to perform their functions. Think of them as a cell's nanomachines. Some of them are so large and complicated that it takes quite a bit of CPU power to calculate how they will fold.
You make a very good point.
A computer that does some task today, should -- assuming it wasn't designed to be flawed or have a fixed life expectancy from the very beginning -- still be capable of doing that task in ten years. And for the most part I think this is true; it will.
Most computers that are 10 years old still run fine today (ones that were well-made in the first place); the problem is more one of finding a purpose for them, and then finding software to run on them, then getting them to start. Actually, I would wager that lots of computers that are 20+ years old would still run fine today, depending on how they've been stored and taken care of in the interim.
The problem isn't that machines really "wear out" all that quickly; with some exceptions few do. It's more the relentless drive of increasing expectations that puts working equipment in the landfill. At least for home users; commercial users have their support contracts to worry about, so it's slightly more complicated.
Case in point: I have an Apple IIc in my closet right now, which I know for a fact works fine. I could take it out tomorrow, set it on my desk, put in Apple Write, fire it up and start typing away. Somewhere around I even have a dot-matrix serial printer that I could use to output from it. Everything that Apple advertised that computer as capable of doing, it is just as capable of doing today as it was twenty-one years ago. So why am I not using it? Why am I sitting here with a computer that's only four years old, when I have a perfectly functional computer from 1984 in my closet? It's not because I like spending money. It's because I want to do things that I can't do on an old computer. There are a lot of things that I consider necessities, or at least things that are nice enough to have that I'm willing to pay for them, that weren't possible or even considered more than a few years ago.
If you honestly think that what you can do with a computer today is all you're ever going to want to do -- that you won't see some neat feature on your friend's box in 2014 and decide that you need to have it -- then you're absolutely correct; the computer you have now is the last one you ought to ever have to buy. Realistically though, most people aren't like this; they know that the computer they have today isn't going to be something they're going to want in five or ten years, and they're not willing to pay for a machine that's built to last longer than that.
The things that people use home computers for has changed, and will continue to change, and the tasks that people want to use their computers for will drive the upgrade cycle far faster than the breakdown rate of the components does.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Methinks you got a bad machine. Good that it was under warranty, though.
I've had more than a few crappy machines that I've run at 100% utilization for months or in one case years on end, without catastrophic failures, so I don't think that any consumer machine is "not built for constant processor work." I suspect that there is a higher rate of manufacturing defects in el cheap consumer machines versus higher-end ones because of more lax quality control, but I don't think they're designed that poorly with certain exceptions (ones that have known overheating issues).
Not that I would recommend that anybody actually purchase one, but if I was going to get a $500 OfficeDepot "blue light special," one of the first things I'd want to do to it would be to put Boinc on and peg the processor and GPU at 100% for however long the return policy on the machine was, just to see if I could find any manufacturing defects. If it incinerates itself, back to the store and get a new one -- it was probably defective. Repeat until one survives, and more likely than not it'll probably still work when you decide to recycle it for something new.
Just as an anecdote, I have an old Compaq 600MHz Celeron that's been running at 100% for several years, with the same uptime as the power company (probably not 'five nines,' but not totally third-world either). At any given time the whole case will be rather hot to the touch. Hasn't failed yet. Admittedly, back when this was being used as a desktop computer, I think it went through a motherboard, two hard drives, and a cooling fan -- pretty much everything in it besides the floppy drive and the PSU crapped out -- so I think it's been exorcised of any defective components.
I really am convinced that the price you pay for better hardware -- and for high quality parts in general -- are less changes to the inherent design, but better quality control and a lower overall defect rate.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I predict that this new client that runs on ATI hardware will cause a spike in sales of their products. I, for one, will be trying to get this card for my computer so that I can improve the rate that folding@home runs on my system. And I'm certain that others have the same intention.
If you think about that, it says something about us that I think is important; people want to help and they're willing to spend their money to be helpful.
The concept of voluntary grid computing is a curious one. Why do people do this? Surely one more little CPU grinding away at a huge problem won't make a difference. Yet even though we all know this, we do it anyway. The result of this collective hopefulness and helpfulness is tangible. But what else is strange is that so little notice is given to grid computing. I don't recall hearing about it on CNN or any other news television program. SETI gets air time because it's so, well, 'out there', but the folding, aids, cancer/find-a-drug stuff is operating in obscurity.
BTW, kudos to Slashdot for helping get the word out. I first heard about grid computing here.
Best regards.