Folding@Home starts tapping GPUs
10.01.06 - 10:31am
Distributed Computing is what some people would consider to be a hobby of mine, others may consider it to be an obsession. I just get extreme satisfaction knowing that all the work I perform overclocking my computers actually goes to use rather than sits there idle waiting for me to crank up a video game or run some other hardware intensive program. Until last week CPUs were the only computer components that could run DC code however ATi and the Folding@Home team have made a breakthrough by running DC code on a GPU rather than a CPU.
You may be thinking now “what do I care, I could care less about Distributed Computing” and for you I have an answer. Distributed Computing has made serious headway in regard to Alzheimer’s, some cancers, Huntington’s Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Parkinson’s Disease, Ribosome and antibiotic designs. With the ability to help solve some of the medical problems that plague our society, why not volunteer some additional computer cycles? Now the important news here is not the accomplishments of the DC community but the new GPU based clients. Distributed Computing is floating point intensive and while CPUs can perform some intense floating point operations, GPUs are king in this realm due to the floating point intensive nature of 3D rendering. ATi and the Stanford F@H team have created a client that can utilize an X1900 series video card which performed between 20 and 40 times the work of a single processor.
Unfortunately NVIDIA based cards will not receive support for a few months if at all but this is still a huge step. With the ability to run F@H on your processor and video card this could bring in the computing power that the F@H team needs to really push their research and create some breakthroughs. For those of you that are suddenly interested in Distributed Computing and Folding@Home feel free to contact me via my contact page or leave a comment. Crunch for Cancer, join a team(XtremeSystems.org has one), and above all know that you are accomplishing something with your normally idle processor. That’s my DC advertising for the month :)
Relevant Links
Anandtech Article on GPU Folding
Folding@Home homepage
XtremeSystems.org Folding@Home Forum
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