Folding@Home Weekly Team News - 28th September 2006

Yes one of the really interesting things about this is the added production teams and users will have will vary greatly, depending on the type of team and the type of user. This team should get quite a large boost, not as much as say a team like Rage 3D which is largely graphics enthusiasts, but better than a team such as Engadget where users are less likely to posess X1900 series cards.

I've bought two sli motherboards over the last two years and i've yet to use the 2nd slot in either of them, if i could pop a card in the second slot to fold that would be great.
 
Damage over at the Tech Report went to the Ati stream computing conference and has put his notes online, i think its worth quoting his notes on Vijay Pandes speech, theres some interesting stuff:
Vijay Pande said:
-We are working on diseases that involve mis-folding of proteins.
-Healthy brain vs. Alzheimer's brain - Amyloid plaque, toxic agent
-Toxic element is a protein that is mis-assembling
-We understand what the toxic elemenrts are, but don't know why they're misfolding or how to stop them
-Futher experiments are very, very challenging
-Turned to computer simulation, distributed computing - Folding@Home
-Currently have power of 200K CPU supercomputer - more powerful than all NSF supercomputers combined
-People fold wherever there's electricity (map)
-Team competitions
-People go to huge extents to compete
-Would be really exciting if we could get PCs to fold faster
-We turned to GPGPU
-FaH on X1900 XT - 20-40X speed increase - What used to take FaH 30 years can now be done on one year
-New FaH client for GPUs - can get ~100 gigaflops per processor
-Oct 2: Release beta version, other versions to follow
-If just 5% of folders join when we turn it on, we'll have a petaflop machine by the end of the day
-Demo - CPU vs. GPU - CPU is almost static, GPU shows constant motion happening
-GPU temp is still relatively cool as far a GPUs go, power consumption is low - about 80W per GPU
-New results: announcements of the first FAH results on Alzheimer's in the coming mornts
-GPUs will give us new possibilities
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Emphasis mine.
The mentions of teams and competition is good, it really shows they know how important the stats are, not like borkely.
Edit: And some more very interesting sutff:
Talk w/Vijay Pande

ATI is currently 8X faster than Nvidia. Nvidia has our code, running it internally, hope we can close the gap. But even 4X difference is large, and ATI is getting faster all of the time.

Lot of work goes into qualifying GPUs internally so they can run.

Making apps like this run on a GPU requires a lot of development work. Currently, science is best served by using ATI chips. Nv may come in future.

Points for a GPU vs. CPU? Announcement is coming Monday. Still debating how that will work. GPUs are fast, but can't do everything CPUs can, so CPUs are still valuable for us, and we have to make economics of points reflect that. Currently looking at a 4X or 5X multiplier over CPUs. It's psychologically easier to raise that multiplier later than to start high and lower it after people went out and bought a bunch of graphics cards.

Possible to make public a benchmarking facility for FAH? Could make sense, put an option in the client to benchmark, server hands it the same WU each time. We can talk about it offline.
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Again, emphasis mine.
So it looks like points for gpus will be different in order to ensure people keep folding with their cpus. So while a gpu might be 40 times faster it will not give 40 times the points.
Not sure what these points multipliers are exactly, i do remember reading about how points are calculated once, but it would seem that the points multiplier for cpus is higher than 4 or 5, perhaps more like 10.
 
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nice find there Joe :)

how it works at the moment is that projects are benchmarked on a test rig and then the points are calculated so that particular machine gets the same PPD no matter what - currently I think this is a P4 2.8GHz with SSE2 disabled and not making use of HT either
bonus points are then added onto this score for WUs with large download/upload sizes or which use a lot more memory than average

I don't really want to guess how the multiplier will actually work but essentially WUs processed on a GPU will be worth a lot less than the same WUs processed on a CPU - we'll have to see how this works before breaking the bank filling any spare PCI-E slots I guess :p


edit: just found myself looking for suitable cards in the members market only to find hornytoe has just put an offer in on one - I had to work quite hard not to post saying I'd take it at asking :D
I'll be waiting to not only hear how the points will work but also if the amount/type of GFX RAM makes a difference, I only have the one PCI-E slot so need to get it right first time :p
 
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It is a little odd they seem to have put any emphasis on the difference between an X1900XT and X1900XTX. Apart from tiny differences in clock speed they are identical.

It takes me less than 2 minutes to make my XT faster than an XTX and the temperature increase is negligable.

Still, what I would give for 50 X1900s :D

SiriusB
 
Woot we're in #45. :p

Can't wait till monday when this client is released. I'll start a specific thread on monday and all those with X1900s can download it and report their findings.

The fact that its a public beta suggests to me that it will be very stable, in the same way that the console client most of us use is.

The one problem i have with these cards is because the stock cooler is relatively quiet no-body is bothering to make cards with better coolers, and i'm not convinced that the stock cooler is quiet enough for me. I'll probably have to fit a zalman to it if i buy one, which risks voiding the warranty if i can't get the stock cooler back on if it has to be sent back.
 
An ATI thread would be useful, Joe. I haven't read up about it apart from what has been posted in here, so a quick start guide would be great
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Duke said:
An ATI thread would be useful, Joe. I haven't read up about it apart from what has been posted in here, so a quick start guide would be great
icon14.gif
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A quick start guide has been posted under the quick guide to cpu folding, you can click my sig to see whats been done so far, it will be completed as soon as the client is available and some folders with x1900 series cards have experimented with the client and reported back, a thread will be posted as soon as the client is available so we can share experiences with it. :)
 
SiriusB said:
Yeah but BOINC is crap. FACT

SiriusB
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fixed

so only X1900 ey? damn I was going to go for a X1800/E6600 combo when I get my new PC, maybe I could do a X1900 and E6300 combo insted!
 
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BillytheImpaler said:
On the other side of the loonie is the FAH@BOINC public beta that went away as quickly as it came out. I hope the GPU client is long-lived.
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Yes but they never really took boinc seriously, they didn't really need it, people weren't demanding it and folding is better standalone than on boinc.
Plus this is a showcase for Ati's stream computing which is very important to them, so i'm sure they will have made certain its stable otherwise it would give them a bad name.
 
rich99million said:
edit: just found myself looking for suitable cards in the members market only to find hornytoe has just put an offer in on one - I had to work quite hard not to post saying I'd take it at asking :D
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Too late. Hornytoe backed out so I just offered asking price :p

(TBH I didn't read this until after and if I'd known you were interested, I would have given you a heads up and first refusal - if you want it, I will let you have it for the same price I bid).

A bloody good week for the team and not a bad week for me considering I'm 10 cores down. The 8 cores I have running appear to be averaging around 300 ppd each :cool: (I'm wondering if maybe the Conroe is actually still working and keeping the averaqe up).

As always, thanks to Rich for the news and welcome to the new peeps :)

Fold on team 10.

Stan :)
 
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