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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.'"
Just think of all the global warming caused by all those CPU's and GPU's cranking away day and night! And all that electricity used! The horror! They are making Al Gore cry!
(I am joking, for those of you who are humor impaired)
I've been doing Folding @ Home for most of my adult life. I fold shirts, pants, underwear, etc. etc.
From the benchmarks I have seen, it seems that there are currently no games that can effectively utilize, for example, 2 9800 GX2s. If Folding@home releases an Nvidia client, those people who have plunked $1000 into graphics cards may finally be able to put them to use!
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.
So let me get this straight, you keep your computer running for long periods of time. The goal is "to understand protein...misfolding"
Sounds like Pornography@home to me...
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=226537,00.asp
Better check up on power consumption there, factor in 124 hours a week at 240 watts (conservative) x150 machines. Take a look at how much money your company is "donating" in raw power consumption, then triple it, cause for every watt of heat dissipated, it takes 2 watts of AC to remove it. See if your CEO approves of that donation to FAH that he can't even write off for tax purposes. (no receipt)
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
"to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."
FYI: This means Prions related diseases => Mad cow disease
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
There's a HUGE difference between an idle computers power consumption and ones whose CPU and RAM throughput are being taxed to the limit by a process like folding. The 240 watts I mentioned is just the CPU, northbridge, RAM, and internal heat evacuation. Drives and monitor are completely irrelevant.
You execs are right to dismiss the notion of shutting down a computer thats idle. It's NOT consuming much. However, when that same computer is crunching foldings numbers for it.... THAT is a huge cost.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
So, here's my thought - before someone sends an email, they contact Folding@Home, identify themselves, say who they want to send an email to, and the contents of the email. F@H gives them a work unit. When they complete it, F@H signs their email. Your email client can filter emails based on how many work units the sender did to send it to you. If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two. If it's a casual email, one work unit will do. Maybe even a fraction of a work unit.
That way, if you read spam, at least you know that you contributed to F@H. If you want less spam, you turn up your threshold for how many work units the sender has to do.
Education is the silver bullet.
Your right I was off on the original data, by about $70 bucks, because I grabbed the wrong number. Early reports on ps3 f@h rated it at 280-300W, but this was corrected down to 190-220W thereafter. My mistake there and I've posted that I was wrong already elsewhere in this thread.
.10, the average person pays more than that because they mostly live in states that are higher. New York and California are both markedly above than 10c 50% and 70% higher, respectively, in fact.
.09-.14 depending on how you arrange the data. (Especially if you consider the places where there is ladder pricing -- where the first X is one price, and beyond that its another price... a high energy device always on can move you up the rungs of the ladder into a new rate category.)
.17 per kWh. so even at the correct Wattage of 215, they pay $351 for an 'old' ps3, and 256 for a new one. Making your $111 quote only 1/3rd their correct price for a 90nm unit, and less than half the price for a 65nm unit.
.18, Hawahii .24, ... and lots of places in Europe and Japan are in that 15-25 ballpark. For all of -them- my numbers were too LOW. ... into not running F@H when they might've contributed a key bit of research important for understanding drug candidates for P53 cancer suppression or Alzheimer's disease treatments. Perhaps I'm being melodramatic, but arguing against F@H makes me a sad panda.
As for the price of electricity, and your assertion that its 10c? vs 12c? Now were just playing statistics. I could justify mine by noting that prices are generally higher in Europe and Japan for electricity. (Its the equivalent of 25c in Japan IIRC, for example.) Or I could point out that the electricity is higher in the states where the population density is higher... so even if the average rate if you look at it by state is
But it doesn't really matter, the cost of a kWh ranges from ~.05 to ~.30. The average is between
As for the newer PS3 being less power hungry, that's true too, and a fair comment.
Please stop spreading FUD about F@H and inflating the costs by more than a factor of two
Oh, so when they upgraded the PS3 to 65nm a couple million of 90nm units power consumption dropped by a factor of 2?
I really hope no one got dissuaded by the bad data in your argument
Me too. I hope they dp their own math for their own circumstances and hardware and make an informed decision for themselves.
People in New York are going to find that even with my Watt numbers as off as they were, my final result for a 90m PS3 was far too LOW. (They pay
If I'm spreading 'fud', what do they call it when you spread false reassurances?
And its not just New York -- Conneticut pays
Yeah, and when you walked past the unicef box and didn't put a quarter in you just made the difference between the next einstein living or dying. shame on you. just set mankind back a century.
I'm not saying people should stop contributing. I'm saying people should be AWARE of what they are contributing. And while I agree that the numbers I posted should have been more 'right', and I regret that they were off, the visibility of the issue remains important.
I support F@H's mission. I don't support them being funded largely by unsuspecting parents of teens who've essentially 'subscribed' to f@h and had the bill tacked on to mom&dad's utilities without so much as a lineitem -- or installed it on all the pcs at work thereby billing it to their employer.
I realize f@h isn't at 'fault' for this, but they have an ethical obligation to be very upfront about what it it will cost, and maybe even perform some sort of basic validation, like requiring an address and sending a snail mail to the occupant thanking them for subscribing, and advising them of the impact. Sure it won't stop people from signing up illicitly but it would mean a lot if F@H made an effort to contribute to ensure the people it was taking money from were actually aware of it.
Actually, a very similar system was tried; I don't know if it's still in any sort of wide-spread use (or as wide-spread as it ever got) or not.
Hashcash involved calculating a hash, taking up CPU time, and sticking it in the email header. The recipient could easily verify that you'd spent CPU to send this message, hence, in theory, proving that you're not a spammer.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.