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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'm not dismissing the contributions to the study of computer science, but the stated goals of the project are:
Agreed. Since the Wii was actually designed to be left on 24/7 I think it would be a great candidate despite being a slower machine.
Not to discredit what Sony has done however. In a year of Stupid decisions, this is one of the shinning examples of a good idea that floated to the top. I hope they encourage its' use by setting milestones (100 WU, 500 WU, 1000 WU etc...) and offer Trophys in Home.
I've only had a PS3 for about 1 month and I keep it on pretty consistantly to fold. About once a week I give it "the night off" (since that system fan is spinning constantly). Since I noticed the Background downloads still work while folding I got to thinking that even when using the system Folding could take please (even at a slower rate). I have a 60 gig PS3 with the EE chip. When playing a PS2 game it is using that chip to play the game so the Cell would be practically dormant. Why not let it "background fold" ? How about a DVD, or a BluRay movie? Playing music of the HDD?
I can't imagine anything shy of a PS3 game (and a big one at that) would be running the Cell full tilt, so why not Add a "Folding@Home" option in system settings and let me chose to add it as a background task?
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
Well, the hand-gestures involved in folding proteins are rather complex....
(couldn't resist)
It's only wasted power if you don't want the heat. If you live in a cold climate you've got yourself a perfect small heater with a COP of 1. So your thermostat-controlled heater won't need to work quite as hard to maintain your room at the target temperature, so you break even energy-wise and effectively get your F@H flops for free.
Of course if you're in a hot climate and want to cool the room, well the opposite is true. You're wasting more power (200W to do the F@H work, and 200W/COP for the A/C unit to shift the heat out of your room).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
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.
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?