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Folding@home GPU2 Beta Released, Examined
ThinSkin writes "Stanford has recently released an update to their Folding@home GPU-accelerated client, which includes notable upgrades such as support for more current Radeon graphics cards and even a visualizer to see what's going on. ExtremeTech takes a good look at the new Folding@home GPU2 client and interviews Director Dr. Vijay Pande about the project. To the uninitiated, Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which hundreds of thousands of PCs and PS3s devote a portion of their computing power to crunch chunks of biological data. The goal is 'to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.'"
From TFA, interestingly this bypasses DirectX and interfaces with the card directly (I guess you'd want to, to throw maths at it instead of vertices)
.Net framework. They do say they're "investigating" an nVidia version, but that sounds a while away.
However it only runs on R600-based Ati cards right now. It also requires
Interestingly also, it claims to parallelize processing the atoms, so it must use the individual stream processors on the graphics card directly.
You shouldn't be joking.
Folding @ Home on a PS3 costs the average participant around $150-200 year in electricity if they run it 24x7. Up to $400+ in places where electricity is more expensive. PCs average less, but only because so many of them are lower power, while all PS3s are high wattage.
I think its a worthwhile project, but the electricity people are donating isn't free and F@H uses a lot more electricity than most people think. "Oh, I've got my PC on anyway", or "Oh it can't be as much as my fridge." both of which are mistaken, your fridge uses a fraction of what a PS3 running F@H does, and even if your PC is on, running at idle or going to sleep uses a LOT less power than maxxing out the cpu and/or gpu 24x7.
A PS3 running @ 280W 24x7 for a year:
280W x 24h/d x 365d/y = 2452800 Watt-hours/year or 2452 kWh/y
at $@.12/kWh that'll cost you: $294.00 / year
Then multiply that by the number of PC's running it... it adds up fast.
Like I said, its a good program and a good cause, BUT its not free. A kid/teen shouldn't be running it without a parents permission and understanding of the cost.
I don't like the F@H 'propaganda' because I think its somewhat deceptive about the costs. Its relying on peoples attitude that their free cpu time is truly free to prevent them thinking about the real costs. If you probe they don't lie about the costs, but ethically they really should be more upfront about them.
And now that there is money involved, I should choose the best use of it. When I'm faced with a decision of choosing the best place to donate $300 I think their are other causes more worthy of my money than F@H. But that's a personal choice. If you want to donate to F@H, by all means do so.
One final issue - generally when you donate more than $10-20 to charity you get a tax receipt. $150-500 quite a bit more than $10.
Here is a post from the Nvidia/CUDA forums from Mike Houston, one of the Folding at Home people: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=28868&view=findpost&p=224490
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
It seems that the PS3 40 GB consumes only half of what you said (135 Watts, see http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/30/40gb-ps3-features-65nm-chips-lower-power-consumption/).
So you can go and buy a second PS3.
Thanks! You are right.
.12c kWh I used in my original post that's ~$150/year. Maybe not a big deal to some, but how many would still sign up if they had to pay $150 to f@h directly instead of having it nickle and dime them daily on their power bill? I suspect the user count would be orders of magnitude lower.
There was information when the PS3/F@H launched that consumption was 280-300W, but apparently that was actually around 200-220W so my post above was out by ~$70, and now with the newer lower wattage PS3s the price comes down even more.
But even at 135W, assuming the same