30,000+ PS3 owners sign up for Folding@home

[hype]

The latest stats for the Folding@home project reveal that more than 30,000 PlayStation 3 owners have now signed up to take part in the project.

The project, which kicked off earlier this month, is being conducted by Stanford University and uses the power of the PS3's Cell chip to calculate data. By utilising the Cells of thousands of consoles world wide, researchers hope to find out more about the causes of diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and cancer.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=23759

[Buba]

I can't afford to let the PS 3 run all the time... It consumes 50% more power than my big ass lcd...

//edit: I don't have one anyway... Just pointing out...

[efoolution]

Interresting Fact on that: 30000 of PS3 do 488 Teraflop of work for that Project, while Windows PC only do 154 Teraflop, and that is 160000 Windows PCs. A Windows PC does under 0,0009 Teraflop, a PS3 does 0,01 Terraflop of work for the Project. That is SOME difference. The 30000 PS3 People who take part, do more than half of the "work", and only are 5% of the Users.
That Cell sure is impressive ...

[Viper007Bond]

And good for Sony for adding support!

[geeman]

PS3 can push out quite a lot more GFLOPS than any of the PC CPUs of today, because it uses both the CPU and GPU to process F@H-packets. The CPU in itself isn't slow either compared to PC CPU's. A high-end PC which could also use the GPU could come pretty close though. Just look at how much TFLOPS those ATI GPU's are churning out.
You also have to take note that a lot of those computers are low-end ones and all those PS3's are at the same power level (which is very high).

[chaos386]

Originally Posted by geeman

PS3 can push out quite a lot more GFLOPS than any of the PC CPUs of today, because it uses both the CPU and GPU to process F@H-packets. The CPU in itself isn't slow either compared to PC CPU's. A high-end PC which could also use the GPU could come pretty close though. Just look at how much TFLOPS those ATI GPU's are churning out.
You also have to take note that a lot of those computers are low-end ones and all those PS3's are at the same power level (which is very high).

The GPU of the PS3 doesn't do any of the folding calculations, it just renders the pretty visualization.

[niccce]

The GPU of the PS3 doesn't do any of the folding calculations, it just renders the pretty visualization.

It's nice to have your opinion on abso-fucking-lutely everything, even if you barely have a clue, isnt it ? No offence intended, yet i sometimes get irritated by people confusing other people's minds just because... well i cant even explain why would one do that. Except if it were for the Aprils fool, in which case har. har.

What are GPU's and how can they help FAH? GPU's are Graphics Processing Units -- chips used in today's PC's to help speed high performance graphics, such as 3D games or 3D scientific visualization. GPUs have the possibility to perform an enormous number of Floating Point OPerations (FLOPs). However, they achieve this high performance by losing generality -- there are only certain types of calculations which would be well-suited to GPUs. However, after much work, we have been able to write a highly optimized molecular dynamics code for GPU's, achieving a 20x to 40x speed increase over comparable CPU code for certain types of calculations in FAH. This means that we will be able to make an enormous advance over what we could do only just a few years ago.

FAQ

[FATMOUSE]

Originally Posted by niccce

It's nice to have your opinion on abso-fucking-lutely everything, even if you barely have a clue, isnt it ?

Even when you are correct, there is a gentler way of stating that fact.

[niccce]

Originally Posted by FATMOUSE

Even when you are correct, there is a gentler way of stating that fact.

There is, indeed. the problem is i'm not in a very gentle mood today. I've tried my best to avoid personal insults tho.

[niccce]

All right, i've calmed down. I apologise. Really, i mean it.
But guys, please do check your facts before you post/say anything.
Anyway, if someone feels like banning me for a couple of weeks, disregard this post alltogether and go straight on, i concur.

[CrazyCavia]

Filled in my name and team nr. on my little brothers PS3, now let's hope he runs the F@H at regular intervals.

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally Posted by niccce

It's nice to have your opinion on abso-fucking-lutely everything, even if you barely have a clue, isnt it ? No offence intended, yet i sometimes get irritated by people confusing other people's minds just because... well i cant even explain why would one do that. Except if it were for the Aprils fool, in which case har. har.

FAQ

niccce im really sorry but he is right.

the RSX in the PS3 is based off of the G70 architechture from nvidia, and architecture which just doesnt lend itself very well to the type of calculation Folding uses. there was talk for ages about a GPU client, and it emerged that it was based on ATi's R580 GPU.

alot of us at anandtech asked about whethered thered be a G70/G71 client but i think we found out that even though it could be done, the performance just wasnt worth having, barely any faster than the cpu's at the time. R580 was just leaps ahead..and it was all down to how the R580's architecture worked, it lent its self much better to GP computing.

so in the PS3, the RSX really only does do the pretty graphics. Cell is the reason for all the performance.

hopefully this will change with the new DX10 gpu's. they are much more versatile and more akin to CPU's. nvidia even launched CUDA with its G80, which is a way for programmers to write code in C++ and then have it compiled to run on the G80 hardware. hopefully it wont be too long before we can harness the colossal power in the G80, but as it stands right now, the only GPU capable of Folding is ATi R580 (found in X1900 and X1950 products)

i mean seriously dude, you moaned at him and you didnt even read the page you quoted

Which GPUs will be supported? We have not made any final decisions on this issue. However, our software will likely require the very latest GPUs from ATI (especially now that the newest ATI GPUs support 32 bit floating point operations). Previous work of ours used NVIDIA GPUs as well, but we have now concentrated on ATI GPU's as they allow for significant performance increases for FAH over NVIDIA's GPU's (at least at the current generation). Our GPU cluster has 25 1900XT's and 25 1900 XTX's. We find a considerable performance increase of 1900XT's even over 1800XT's, due to the architectural differences between the R580 and R520 GPU's. Our code will run on R520's, but considerably more slowly than R580. We're very much looking forward to trying out R600's.

i mean there you have it, from the horses mouth. they tried nvidia, found ATi to be significantly better and just dropped trying to make it work on nvidia all together.

December 2006 We have been looking into the ability to run Folding@home on nVidia G80's and have found a bug in the G80 driver. We have informed nVidia about it and are waiting for them to resolve it.

they are looking to pick nvidia up again with the G80 as expected. they are just waiting on a driver fix so that they can begin...but given the state of NV's driver releases so far, they might not get their wish too soon

It seems that the PS3 is more than 10X powerful as an average PC. Why doesn't it get 10X PPD as well?
We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WU's. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).

theres little point in having the cell and RSX do work because the limitations are different. RSX is poor at folding as it is anyway.

VISUALIZATION
How does the PS3 client's visualization compare to other FAH clients?
The PS3 client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

GPU and OS support
Which cards are supported?
We now support serveral classes of GPU boards, including X1600, X1800, and X1900 class GPU's from ATI. At the launch, we supported X1900 cards only. X1800 cards do not provide the performance seen in X1900's and so we strongly recommend X1900 class cards (although we now officially support X1800). X1900 and X1800 cards are actually quite different -- they have different processors (R520, R530 vs. the R580 [in the X1900 series]). The R580 makes a huge difference in performance -- its 48 pixel shaders are key, as we use pixel shaders for our computations. Also note that the card should have more than 256MB (i.e. at least 512MB) of RAM, otherwise the GPU client will put a huge load on the client machine (although we do note that the 256MB X1950Pro using PCIe does work reasonably well).

What about video cards with other (non-ATI) chipsets?
The R580 (in the X1900XT, etc.) performs particularly well for molecular dynamics, due to its 48 pixel shaders. Currently, other cards (such as those from nVidia and other ATI cards) do not perform well enough for our calculations as they have fewer pixel shaders. Also, nVidia cards in general have some technical limitations beyond the number of pixel shaders which makes them perform poorly in our calculations.

do i need to go on? that seems to suggest that RSX might be doing a very small amount of work contributing to folding, but my guess is its the by product of it having to calculate where to position all the little atom things.