Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Folding@Home Begins with Impressive Numbers
hansamurai writes "As we've previously discussed, the Folding@Home client is now available on the PS3, and already some early results are in. The total number of teraflops generated by PS3s has already exceeded all other OS contributions combined and the entire project is heading towards one petaflop of distributed computing power. Stanford notes that their teraflops calculation is conservatively calculated so the total power could be under-appreciated. With the PS3 European release complete and the Folding client already available to them, the number of users will continue to grow for the time being, let's hope that the project does not run out of work units to pass out. Kotaku has some numbers that are a few hours old since the Stanford server is getting hit pretty hard with the renewed interest in the project."
Gizmodo has more current numbers (which are also a little behind). Currently they're showing 346 TFLOPS for PS3s.
God Fucking Damnit
Remember all that energy we aren't supposed to be wasting?
Last I heard, F@H was a feel-good novelty that is doubtful to ever produce any meaningful results.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As we've previously discussed, the Folding@Home client is now available on the PS3, and already some early results are in [CC].
When will the SNES version finally be available?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Impressive, but I wonder if this interest among PS3 owners will drop off. Especially when GTA IV comes out, or they get next months power bill.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Is if you can write-off your PS3 as a charitable purpose since its spending the bulk of its time volunteering;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Cell is very optimized toward one data type for calculation: 64bit floats. If you want to efficiently use the PS3 in a cluster, just be aware that your code must:
a) use primarily 64bit floating point
b) either:
- fit code and data segments within 256K for each SPU
- crunch long enough between streamed data blocks such that DMA latency doesn't kill performance
c) have the entire calculation broken down into no more than six parts for streaming (one per SPU)
There are SPU userspace threading models that run cooperatively (similar to the old userspace pthreads, I guess), but the thread manager consumes valuable SPU RAM. Also, SPUs don't support a supervisor bit for memory protection... so... bad things happen when threaded code running on SPU goes tits up.
If you want to calculate 128bit floats, ints, or have lots of branch logic... buy a quad core2duo; cell don't do you any good.
BTW: Anyone here hacking GEANT or BLAST for Cell?
I don't know about others, but I've turned on the auto-start option so that if the console sits idle it will run this in the foreground. It might take a while to complete a work-unit but at least it's still going. Plus it looks really nice. This way I don't have to conciously start it when I'm going to walk away from the PS3 for a few hours but know I'll play it later. Also, combined with the autodownload feature I can leave the console running to download a few movie trailers (Transformers, A Bee's Story and Shrek 3 hit last night) or game demos and have Folding run as well.
let's hope that the project does not run out of work units to pass out.
If they are out of work units, doesn't that mean they are that much closer to their goal? To me, it seems that if they run out of work units, it means the work is being completed quicker then expected. Seems like a good problem to have.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
I'm quite impressed. Is this going to burn the CPU out really quickly?
looking at the statistics for the recently released PS3 folding@home client, i begin to wonder how much better the xbox360 could do, since F@H already has an ATI GPU client, that according to the F@H statistics page, produces about 2.4 times the teraflops per processor as the PS3's CPU-only client. granted, a knowledgeable individual might be able to leverage the XNA dev kit to design a F@H client (if the dev kit even gives enough 'bare metal' access to the GPU), but that would see very limited distribution, i was wondering what could be done to have the xbox360 dashboard team design an integrated distributed processing client (a dedicated client, background client during dashboard/etc, or both) so that those idle CPU cycles (almost 11,000,000 CPU/GPU's worldwide, just 1% of them would contribute approximately 6.47 petaflops, over 10 times the current total teraflops in the project) could help cure cancer. as someone who lost his mother to cancer at a young age, i can't begin to express how significant this could be to help others avoid that same tragedy.
In case anyone is wondering about what the project has acheived so far, here is the link.
Concerning global warming, the processing statistics imply the PS3 is by far the most efficient. At 380 watts (at least this is what I've heard), using the statistics given (which are said to be conservative in the case of the PS3), that puts the PS3 at 63 teraFLOPS/megawatt, or 16.5 kilowatts/teraFLOPS. I'm not really familiar with this, but isn't that fairly good? It's definately better than using PCs. Blue Gene/L, which is supposed to be very efficient, will deliver 240,000 FLOPS/watt, or about 0.24 teraFLOPS/megawatt. My calculations may be off, but that suggests the PS3 is highly efficient and a better use of power than a supercomputer.
I'm sure I'm missing some important considerations, so can someone through a little knowledge at this?
Is that people are apparently running this instead of playing games on their PS3.
:-)
But, I guess it's a good thing, I mean there are what? Two decent PS3 games out now?
... besides the number of PS3 owners that are running this? The PS3 seems to be significantly slower than the GPU client for example
GPU: 41tflop 697cpus
PLAYSTATION®3 346tflop 14138cpus
so basically the GPUs are 2.4x as powerful as the PS3s.
-- the cake is a lie
Somehow, I doubt that people buying a $600 game system will care if their power bill goes up $1 (or $10 or $20) a month. Power is one of those things that most people ignore and simply pay unless it's completely out of whack. My commercial power bill fluctuates by sometimes as much as a hundred bucks a month, but even that's not enough to make it worth my time to figure out what might be causing it.
I don't respond to AC's.
a GPU would be even better, since you could get 2.4x the TFLOPS for half of the watts easily (100-130W for the GPU, 30-40W for the rest of the system idling). Heck, if I was a supercomputer manufacturer I'd just put a laptop-friendly slow CPU on an SLI motherboard with two GPUs and with a solid state read-only flash for booting, removing even more power-related overhead and failure points.
-- the cake is a lie
So the PS3 looks amazing, up to 20 times faster then an average computer?
Well as others pointed out the Cell processor is MADE to do this, it's not made to do games (believe me, the processor has stuff that's directly against good programming design for video games, the size of the memory available to each process is a big problem) but it can do this.
However also remember that for the PC you're also running an OS under it. running a firewall, a anti-virus software, Explorer or firefox, and other fun tools will slow you down even more. The way I read it is that a raw Ps3 with nothing else running is about 20 times faster then an average PC with an average workload of stuff on it. I still run folding at home, I support it, but my Bittorrents, my video tools, my firefox will all take away the precious cycles that Folding is after, however on a Ps3 if it's running at all it's running at maximum speed as there's nothing else really in the background. So the numbers will run a bit higher.
Overall the Ps3 is a remarkable crunching computer, too bad that doesn't make for a great video game system....
the PS3 uses a lot less energy to do this, and most of the time people aren't using it anyway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/SPU.html
LOL, and you took the time to flame me for my post? Puleeeeeeze.
That's not ironic, it's just coincidental.
When the GPU client first came out, it was pointed out that it was actually using different work units than the normal PC version and so the numbers weren't directly comaparable. I don't know what the situation is for the PS3, but it may not be using the same work units as either the GPU version or the PC version, and thus not directly comparable to either.
Slashdot team# 11326 Now go get your PS3 and start crunching numbers.
Well, since I'm currently running this I thought I would chime in. The PS3 is more than likely using different WUs. The average WU size for the PS3 that I have seen so far is between 400k and 500k frames. The usual range for PC WUs that I have seen is between 5k to 20k frames.
My PC, which is only an Athlon 64 3500+ (benchmarked at 7190 in F@H) can crunch through a frame every 1 minute and 7 seconds.
My PS3 is going through a frame every 0.067 seconds.
Frame performance doesn't mean much in F@H because different WUs can have different frame sizes. Nevertheless, the PS3 client is performing a lot of work in a very short period of time. I would be curious to see benchmark results released from Stanford showing the relative performance difference between a high-end Core 2 Duo and the Cell in the PS3.
Also, since I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, the GPU client on the F@H site are all ATI X1900s. The work units performed by GPU clients and Cell clients are of a different type than those performed by general purpose CPUs. Check the F@H FAQs for more information.
Gizmodo has more current numbers (which are also a little behind). Currently they're showing 346 TFLOPS for PS3s.
Is hundreds of thousands of PC users shouting "AIMBOT" and "CHEATER".
Seriously tho, I've been shocked at the GPU/PS3 #'s...still doesn't make me want a PS3...ATI/AMD AGP 19XX
Radeon, maybe. (do they exist? I thought they did, but nothing on the 'egg...yet).
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Yes. I was absolutely wrong. I've been corrected numerous times, but because that post is improperly modded up it's getting undue attention. Thanks for the detailed correction.
So what has all this computing power actually accomplished for science thus far? What new protein folding processes have been discovered that are going to help treat and cure diseases?
Wait!
Le'me get the popcorn!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
According to Folding@Home, GPUs account for the greatest amount of calculations (while CPUs are necessary for others). But the only GPUs supported are flagship tier ATI 1900XT & 1900XTX (presumably 1950XT as well), not Nvidia nor 1800XT's. This makes the PlayStation 3 greatly weighted against the PC, because not only do they have seven Cell processors (GPUs, in Folding@Home's eyes), but most PC's don't have the required videocard to even try to take on the PS3. This makes the PS3 seem to dominate computers, when the reality is that it's not an even playing field.