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."

Comments

What about global warming?

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:What about global warming?

[cxreg]

Of course we have no idea WHAT we are folding. We could be helping create the next superbug for all we know.

Heh. The client does tell you what protein you're looking at, if you care enough to investigate it. My understanding is that the most likely benefit to disease research would be finding how "bad folds" happen, which are responsible for things like Alzheimers.

Re:What about global warming?

[GrievousMistake]

They have a Results page showing some of the problems that Folding@Home have been applied on. Not unbiased, but it seems like they're putting it to use.
As to useful results, it's just a distributed supercomputer. Why would its results be more feel-good and less meaningful than those of any other ~500 TFLOP computer? It's not like researchers can ever get enough processing power. Molecular folding is a processor intensive and parallelizable research problem with real applicability, and I'd rather see people spend power on this than on SETI@home.

Re:What about global warming?

[qbwiz]

The numbers in that article can't be right. 240000 flops/watt*1.5 Megawatts = 360 gigaflops, not 360 teraflops. It looks like it should really be 240000000 flops/watt (or 240 teraflops/megawatt), which is relatively consistent with their explanation of 5.6 gigaflops per 12 watts per chip (that number is slightly higher, but it doesn't consider RAM and other components). This is therefore better than the PS3's 65 teraflops/megawatt.

The Real Question Now

[Shadow Wrought]

Is if you can write-off your PS3 as a charitable purpose since its spending the bulk of its time volunteering;-)

What's so impressive here...

[MarcoAtWork]

... 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.

Re:What's so impressive here...

[EGSonikku]

After being idle a few minutes the stats go away and it's just the (moving) protein and the (moving) globe in the background.

Conversely, you could just turn off your TV.

Re:power bill

[ucblockhead]

380 watts == 9.12 kWh per day. Here in California, I pay about $0.22 per kWh for "above baseline" power, which means it'd cost me almost $2/day, or $60/month to run.

I wonder if that can be written off as a charitable expense.