PDA

View Full Version : Folding@Home News - PS3 launch early results


MONK
24th March 2007, 23:55
Just saw this on the Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu/)website.

With the PS3 launch, we've added a lot of CPU power to Folding@Home, with the total FLOPS now greatly increased an on its way to a Petaflop. Also, we've gotten a lot of crossover interest in the other Folding@Home clients (Win, Lin, OSX; SMP; and GPU), which is also wonderful.

As of 00:00 25/03/2007 in TFLOPS* from the Stats page. (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats)

Windows 152
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7
Mac OS X/Intel 9
Linux 43
GPU 43
PLAYSTATION®3 647


*TFLOPS is the actual teraflops from the software cores, not the peak values from CPU/GPU/PS3 specs. We take a conservative approach to FLOP calculation, rendering quantities such as exp(x) or sqrt(x) as a single FLOP, if the hardware supports it. This can significantly underestimate the FLOP count (as others would count an exp(x) as 10 or 20 FLOPS, for example).


Roll on 2007 and some serious power play.

Boffykins
25th March 2007, 00:31
The results are staggering. 24 gigaFLOPS per PS3, just under 1 gigaFLOP per Windows PC. Only GPUs beat it, 58gigaFLOPS per GPU. nVidia need to add support for their cards. Pronto.

MONK
25th March 2007, 10:20
Yeah the reason for the mass speed is that....

They do certain types of calculations (implicit solvent) very quickly (20x to 40x faster), but can't do other types of calculations at all (eg explicit solvent, where the SMP client is kicking ass).

So the CPU is still safe.

The GPU client is pure DX9 w/ PS3.0 via the BrookGPU, but it looks like performance is poor on anything less than an G80. The big problem though is they get complier bugs on Nvidia cards currently.