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Impressive GPU Numbers From Folding@Home

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-fast dept.

ludd1t3 writes, "The Folding@Home project has put forth some impressive performance numbers with the GPU client that's designed to work with the ATI X1900. According to the client statistics, there are 448 registered GPUs that produce 29 TFLOPS. Those 448 GPUs outperform the combined 25,050 CPUs registered by the Linux and Mac OS clients. Ouch! Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits? If so, does that mean that IBM was right all along with their AS/400, iSeries product which makes heavy use of ASICs?"

7 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Lopsided Alright.. by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Those 448 GPUs outperform the combined 282,111 CPUs registered by the Linux and Mac OS clients. Ouch! Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits? If so, does that mean that IBM was right all along with their AS/400, iSeries product which makes heavy use of ASICs?"

    That's pretty lopsided, but I suppose some of it could be explained away by GPU's not chewing through OS code and having to play nice for memory, so they'd be a bit more efficient. Could be most of those Linux and MacOS systems are long of tooth, but suspect someone's missed a few decimal places somewhere. I do love how quick a theory is posed and the OP starts to run with it. e.g. I look at the balance of my checking account and see there's $1,000 more in there than I expect there to be and immediately form the hypothesis that it's money to spend, without considering whether my rent check has gone through yet. Could be a rough time ahead if I went shopping with it. Either that or the GPU computers are on more than the others.

    Whoops, used an old pentium for the math, never mind.

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    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:Lopsided Alright.. by oringo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can look at the statistics many ways. Here's the GFLOP/CPU catagorized by OS:

      1. GPU: 65.463
      2. Linux: 1.219
      3. Windows: 0.948
      4. Mac: 0.511

      Of course, GPU beating the hell out of CPU in such tests is no surprise. It's pretty much a massive parallel vector engine. I'm more interested in seeing how PS3 holds agains all other guys when it comes out. They have a folding client for PS3 already.

  2. Re:Distributed amongst home users by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The folding team has done this, and it will be a free download for the PS3 version. The Cell processor runs the Folding application itself, and the graphical representation of the protein folding calculations will be handled by the GPU with a pretty display.

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    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  3. This is the perfect time... by loraksus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... to start heating your house with your computers ;)

    I actually installed boinc with seti on several of my machines last night and it worked quite well to heat part of the house (us Canadians need to turn the heater on earlier). Took a bit of time to get started, but it was nice and toasty in the morning.

    Does anyone know if this method is less efficient in generating heat than using a apace heater? Slower perhaps...
    If you're going to use energy by turning on the wall heater anyways, why not use it to crunch some numbers?

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    1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcfv gbhnjmk,l.;/
  4. Move the vector processor on-board? by Zygfryd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So when are we going to see (x86/64) motherboards with a socket for a standard processor and a socket for a vector processor?
    Couldn't we finally have graphics cards that only give output to the screen and separate vector processors with a standardized interface / instruction set?

  5. Re: Are ASICs really that much better? by doublebackslash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Partially true. The GPUs of today now have some general purpose circuits, but they are far from optimized and the execution unit count is skewed to the point that these processors would never, ever be able to run, say, an OS with anything approaching efficiency. FAH benefits from the insane amount of Floating point power because FAH is nothing but a pure FP stress test. They had to heavily modify the code to run on these babies, basically tuning the problems into vector information and letting the GPU do its thing, throwing. Only a few areas involve a need for CPU style processor, which is functionality provided only on these new cards. So please, please realize that even though these cards do not a contain a "protein folding circuit", they did modify the program to run on what it does have: 4x4 matrix operation units for multiplication and addiction.

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    md5sum /boot/vmlinuz
    d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e /boot/vmlinuz
  6. Re: Are ASICs really that much better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A GPU is an ASIC. Any chip that is unique to a manufacturer is an ASIC. Likewise opamps, voltage regulators, logic gates, etc are not ASICs since one can get pin-compatible devices from many manufacturers.

    And yes, a cloned processor (the various 386's) would be an ASIC since the execution timings from different manufacturers would be different even if the pins are the same.