Nvidia And Stanford Finalizing Folding@Home Client For GeForce GPUs
Santa Clara (CA) - During Nvidia Editor’s Day, we learned that Nvidia and the Folding@Home research group led by Vijay Pande are making final preparation to launch the first version of the Folding@Home client for Nvidia graphics processors.
The unveiling of the client is set for the next week as part of the launch of Nvidia’s GT200 GPU series. Owning such a card will have its benefits in Folding@Home and will outrun Radeon 3870 cards. The new GeForce cards are expected to hit more than 650 nanoseconds of protein simulation in a single day, while the Radeon HD 3870 is stuck at about 170 ns. The Playstation 3 is able to produce "only" 100 ns of simulation, while a quad-core CPU creates an output of just four nanoseconds. For those who are keeping count: The GeForce GPU will be about 163 times faster than a quad-core processor in this specific application.
Nvidia founded Team "Whoopass", which consists only of several computers that are running the Folding@Home GPU client. Even with just 4-5 test machines, the team quickly moved into the top 5% of all contributors by sheer processing power. Dr. Vijay told us that if only 1% of all CUDA-capable users would start using Folding@Home in their spare time, the Folding@Home machine would quickly be considered the fastest performing HPC computer in the whole world - hitting about 60-80 Peta FLOPS of processing power.
Folding@Home for Nvidia CUDA-capable graphics cards (GeForce 8 and above) should become available next week. The codename for this client is GPU2/NVIDIA. The GPU1 client was retired, while GPU2 client will continue to be updated for both Nvidia and ATI cards.
ATI was first with a client for the Folding@Home project, which was released back in September of 2006 for the X1900 series of cards. Back then, the cards topped out at 375 GFlops. The next GPU generation should provide more than double the horsepower.
http://free-and-useful.blogspot.com
"PS Note that Tom's H numbers are a bit misleading. We're not getting 650ns/day (yet) on the gtx280 (more like 550) and we're now getting 250ns/day on 3870's in the lab (perhaps 300ns/day in time), and the 3870's are the previous gen ATI cards. The gtx280 is going to be really great at folding though."
Everyone, please note that the performance specs they're quoting in the article (and in Vijay Pande's response above) are based on the new GPU nVidia is releasing next week. Those of us with the older GPUs will not have the same performance boost but it still should be much better than the SMP or single core clients.
You can find all sorts of information on their website: http://folding.stanford.edu
Basically, they use your computer when it's "twiddling its thumbs" to crunch a minute portion of a protein's normal (or abnormal) folding process. The result is sent back to Stanford, where they add it into the results returned by other participants. There are over one million participants from all parts of the world, so Stanford is able to get faster results than if they used a supercomputer!
Think more before praising similar projects.
If you're SO informed, are you really sure that the folding research results will be worth more than its electricity bill and environmental damage caused when producing electricity for it? If not, it WILL be a waste.
Perhaps this project will be worth the invested resources but SETI@HOME, for example, will probably cause more damage than benefit.