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Folding @ Home Petaflop Barrier Crossed
The official PlayStation blog is reporting that the petaflop barrier has been crossed by the nodes participating in the Folding @ Home project. The article talks about what this means for computer science, and why this awesome amount of computational power was reachable. "Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console -- we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend."
There aren't any games, so it's just sitting there doing nothing anyways. Might as well burn cycles on something useful.
Granted that could change once there is more compelling content around, but until then, fold away.
i downloaded the client on friday and i've put two others onto doing the same....seriously i did.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
Now, until they come up with a way to use my Wii to fold proteins (and Dr. Baker has a great lab doing that here at the UW), I'll just use it to play Wii Sims instead.
On a processor level, I must admit the literal hardware of the PS3 is vastly more suited for the calculations involved in folding proteins, so it might be a while, even if there are many more Wii systems being sold.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not dismissing the contributions to the study of computer science, but the stated goals of the project are:
PS3 isn't the best for Folding@home.
The GPU engine is over twice as powerful at folding than the PS3 CPU. The GPU is just better suited for complex maths stuff.
I'd be a lot more interested in Folding @Home if their EULA wasn't so damn draconian. When I thought about installing it, I just glanced over the EULA to see if there was anything outrageous in it. There was a section that basically said they could monitor what I'm playing on my PS3 at any time - whether I was running it at that time or not.
-- toolie
Whoever put it there has mighty little knowledge of this science project.
Too bad it couldn't fold my laundry.
If you want to talk about whether Real Science is being done, too many of the top machines are working on various aspects of Weapons of Mass Destruction and therefore aren't publishing a lot of results for the scientific community... For a number of years, the fastest machine was Seti@Home, but their statistics reporting has gotten a lot less useful so it's no longer easy to tell how much CPU is being used to search for signals from little green men, and I think by about 2005 it was no longer on top even ignoring the linpak-vs-bogomips disconnect.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Dear Slashdot editors,
Its a milestone not a barrier. The 640k memory limit on PCs was a barrier. Going faster than the speed of sound was a barrier. A barrier requires technical challenges to be met to move beyond a specific maximum point. A milestone is significant only in artificial numeric terms, such as reaching a percentage of a goal, or achieving a number of ops per sec that happens to be divisible by 2^10.
Its still quite newsworthy and very cool, but it isn't a broken barrier.
Has anyone else had systems issues with this? When I run the program, a number of times, my computer has frozen up and I had to do a hard reboot. I tried to ignore it but after a number of months of that garbage, I've uninstalled it.
My theory was that perhaps they're doing some kind of low level hardware calls my system doesn't like. Anybody else seen this on an HP laptop (or any other hardware)?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Cycles per second in the computing world have always been in base 10, not base 2. This is divisible by 10^3, not 2^10.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Usage_notes
this is way off topic, but ive been curious: quite often, a story will have tags on it that are almost nonsensical, and it seems unlikely that they even show up unless a lot of people are tagging the story with the same weird tags. Now how are people doing this? is there some group out there gaming the system or what?
I am about to go back into the nursing home where my father lays dying of late stage Lewy Body Dementia, another form of Alzheimer's. The doctor says he has until midnight. As someone who has watched a healthy old man turn slowly into an unresponsive shell, and watched a previously loving family split over how he is to be cared for, and all the horrors that go along with that, I offer thanks to you and all the others that fold when you can (I've been doing so for quite a while now). Life is indeed not always fair and if you could spare a few cycles whether it be on your PS3 or your PC, or whatever else it runs on, I suggest the possible pros outweigh whatever cons you might come up with. If folding does lead to cures, vaccines or even more understanding, it's a good thing, believe me. It's too late for my old man but it might be in time for you, or me, or someone you know. Bring on the next barrier (or milestone).
:)
Cheers. And may yours be the cycle that matters.
They did it on a PS3. If they had done it on a system which is actually deployed across many homes, then you could downgrade it to a milestone. (If they had done it on XBox360, maybe it wouldn't be a milestone so much as an Achievement. If they had done it on the Wii... just skip the press release, we get the idea already, the entire world owns Wiis.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The GPU client is indeed much faster than the PS3 or quad core cpu at the moment. It is also less generic or versatile with the calculations it can perform. The x86 CPU is the most generic and versatile, then the PS3 and then the GPU client which has the least versatility. The last F@H 1.2 update for the PS3 added some more generic calculation ability and added performance enhancements.
Best is relative to what is needed here. The current research needed at any given moment seems to determine which method will produce the best and most useful results.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
The Folding@Home FAQ does mention it runs the PS3 at 200w while running, but thank you for itemizing what that actually means, so people better understand their contribution. However even if you didn't look it up I don't suppose anyone thought it ran on our belief in Faeries. Also if someone hooked their PS3 up to an alternate fuel source (wind, solar, etc...), you can bet they are in the minority.
So part of the question is "should we work to save humanity, or the environment"? I consciously chose humanity as we should outlive this planet anyway. Even if we don't use up all the resources, or over pollute it at our rate of reproduction we will overcrowd it in a few hundred years anyway, and need to leave.
Now...not to knock on the door of progress or achievements but you're telling me that the greatest news the PS3 has under it's belt is that it reached a milestone in Distributesd Computing. Me? If that's all a 600$ console can do well right now...I'd feel ripped off!
So Jesus, Mohammed and Abraham walk into a Bar....
More accurate or more precise? I think this is a pretty important difference. If I'd been running F@H for a while, I'd be upset to find out it was lacking accuracy; that's a lot of wasted (or less valuable than they could be) cycles I'd paid for.
For the cell, they took the # of PS3's and multiplied it by 8 to get # of active CPU's. Shouldn't they have multiplied by 6, since one isn't active and one is reserved?
enjoy your $599
I wonder why the parent got modded as flamebait.
Sony and FAH ported the folding software for use on the PS3. It's fast as hell. IIRC, it's 40x faster than the typical CPU. FAH comes installed on the PS3, you just need to enable it.
Best regards.
Ok, what if Sony comes out with a cooler running unit with more processing power. At what point to you think that this is a worthwhile expenditure. Electricity here in Idaho is below 6 cents kwh. Alzheimer's runs in my wife's family. Do you even know how bad it's going to hurt if she comes down with Alzheimer's?
I leave my Desk AND my laptop running 24/7. The laptop's been at it for almost 3 years. The desktop longer. I've been eyeballing a new CPU/Mobo/Radeon GPU card combo just for its folding capabilities. They're doing stuff on our PC's that wouldn't get done otherwise.
But there's another reason to participate. By joining the effort, it creates a demand for better folding software. The first folding software was Windows only. Slashdot's participation helped get the Linux client done. So, there's a virtuous circle to joining; the more that join, the more that can join. Hopefully, someday soon, everybody's idle cycles will be 'recycled'.
Best regards.
>I wonder why the parent got modded as flamebait.
I wonder too. I thought it was a valid question.
Is this an unsolvable problem? Solving this problem may be equal to predicting the weather 30 days in advance. This problem seems to mimic other problems. It may be that these problems are unsolvable no matter how much energy and data you use. The nightmare to this is that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are all three body systems that may only be solvable with a quantum computer. I have similar arguments with the debate on which came first DNA RNA or proteins. I believe that life needs all three of these to be considered as a form of life, an abstract three body system that is full of infinite change that can evolve. It may be that all other systems never made it past the big bang.