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Impressive GPU Numbers From Folding@Home
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?"
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits?
Generally ASICs are much better than general-purpose circuits except in general cases.
Custom app written to run on hardware specifically designed to run apps like it, outperforming general purpose CPUs? Newsflash from Ric Romero!!1!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
ASCII silly question, get a silly ANSI.
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So, will someone please create a really pretty 3D screensaver representing the folding calculation process? I'd love to see a represention with hi-res lighting and texturing, full transforms, and user-scalable views at 400 million triangles/sec.. Thanks.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
GPUs are, for the most part, highly specialized parallel computers. Virtually all modern CPUs are serial computers. They do essentially one thing at a time. Because of this, most modern programming languages are taylored to this serial processing.
Making a general purpose parallel computer is very, very hard. It just so happens that you can use things like shaders for more than just graphics processing, and so via OpenGL and DirectX you can make GPUs do some nifty things.
In theory, and indeed often in practice, parallel computers are much, much faster than their serial counterparts. Hence the reason a GPU that costs $200 can render incredible 3D scenes that a $1000 CPU wouldn't have a prayer trying to render.
... 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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- Cool, can I play too?
- No, that's what consoles are for.
Take one hundred people with computers, and who have an interest in Folding@Home. Offer them a CPU-driven version of the app, and 100 computers will be running the CPU-driven app, regardless of the age/performance of the machine.
Now, offer them a GPU-driven alternative. For the most part, the only people that will install and run it are those with a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it, and for the most part, the only people that have a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it have high-performance computers as well (or at least more recent computers that came with compatible cards.)
So let's say that's ten out of the hundred, and those ten are statistically likely to have had the highest-performing CPUs as well; so you've pulled the top ten performers out of the CPU-client pool, and thrown them in the GPU-client pool. Even if you didn't switch those ten people over to the GPU, you could probably isolate those computers' CPU-client performance numbers from the other 90 and find that they're disproportionally faster than a larger number of the slower computers.
There's still more to the story, of course, but you really are taking the highest-performing computers out of the CPU pool and into the GPU pool. The exception would be high-performance servers with lousy/no graphic cards, but those are likely working so hard to perform their normal business that Folding@Home isn't a priority.
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?
X1900 - 48 pixel shader processors plus 8 vertex shaders. Assuming you manage to run them all equally in parallel: 56 processors.
Standard CPU - 1 core (assuming dual cores get read as 2 CPUs).
448 GPUs x 56 = 25,088 effective processors all with on card memory.
25,050 CPUs x 1 core = 25,050 effective processors all dealing with system busses etc.
In short, if you're performing one simple task trillions of times, many very simple, highly optimized processors with dedicated memory do the job better than even a similar number of much more capable processors that have to play nice across a whole system.
And this ignores the number of old couple of hundred megahertz systems that people don't use anymore so hand over to the task vs. X1900s being the very high end of ATIs most recent line.
For massively parallel tasks like rendering pixels, folding proteins, compressing frames of a movie, etc. I'd absolutely love large quantities of a simple processor. For most other tasks, given present technology, I'd still side with fewer more able processors. Either way comparing 448 of something with 56 processors within it to 25,000 single processors and saying, "But 448 is SO much less than 25,000!" is an unfair comparrison.
UTF are you talking about? I'm quite sure the mods are not latin-1 post like this go unmoderated.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Imagine if they had developed this application for NVidia video cards, probably 2x the speed!!1! Go ahead, mod me a troll....I will appologize tomorrow :o)
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
>Using your CPU as a space heater is not a bad idea. It is 100% efficient.
Not really. Consider exergy. Yes, your CPU is just as efficient as any electric space heater. However, consider that the alternative is probably burning natural gas or oil in a furnace. If you burn fuel for heat, 90%+ of the chemical energy goes to producing heat (the rest is lost as unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust). If you burn fuel to spin a turbine at a power plant, only about 40% goes to electrical energy, and unless it's a cogeneration plant which uses the waste heat for industrial purposes, the rest is lost as heat up the smokestacks. So, starting from the fossil-fuel source, electrical heating is less than half as efficient as burning fuel for heat. If you do need to heat using electric power, it's much more efficient to use that electricity to pump heat in from a lower temperature outside than it is to turn that electricity itself into heat.
If you are stuck with electric (non-heat-pump) heating in your house, however, you are correct: There is absolutely no reason not to run your CPU or any other electrical appliance full tilt.
Look at the number of Tflops per active cpu by OS. .948 .51
= osstats
I took (TFlop/active cpu)*1000 to get a readable number --
or Gflops/cpu
Windows is
Mac is
Linux is 1.21
And GPU is 65!
The source:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype
The average Linux user proably has a decent AMD Athlon,
The average Windoze user has a P4 Dell.
Athlons just crunch the math better.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Man, imagine how simple-minded and yet weak superhuman an AI that ran solely on GPUs would be?
"I can think of many, many things at once. As long as they are the same type of thing."
Electricity isn't water, you can't return it to the source.
With a lower power factor, you're either forcing the power company to install huge banks of capacitors, or making the generators work that much harder for fewer watts actually delivered/used. That's practically the definition of "inefficent".
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In the case of computer power supplies that use a rectifier and capacitor combination for AC to DC conversion which is almost all of them, they do not look like an inductive or capacitive load but have a lower power factor caused by drawing current in pulses instead of a sine wave. The result is a higher RMS current then necessary for the load which causes increased line losses and requires higher current capacity for a given power. In extreme cases, distribution transformers can go into saturation causing additional losses.
A power factor of 0.6 does not mean 0.6 watts available for every watt sent. It means the capacity of the line is reduced to 60% of normal do to excessive circulating current. This is easy to see when you look at the rated output power of a typical wall socket, 120 VAC x 15 A = 1800 W, of which you can only use 1100 watts (actually 1080) for a computer load. 1100 watts is the largest common size for inexpensive uninterruptible power supplies for this very reason.
A 0.6 power factor should cause about a 66% increase in line losses for a given load.