Next gen consoles to support distributed computing.

[khiloa]

(sorry if this is a dup)

I just saw this on /. http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67835,00.html

[TollhouseFrank]

sweetness.... i can smell X-Box 2 farms...

[Arkaine23]

I find that hard to beleive for the PS3 as you will practically have to stick it in the fridge anyway.

[veryhumid]

i didn't see anywhere that they said the consoles would support it, just that it would be a good idea. maybe i missed something. it would definitely get me back into consoles.

[Ven0m]

It's still not certain. I've got no idea what PS3 performance going to be, but Xbox360 with properly written client should do like a few thousand PPD.

Still I doubt that they'll do it, at least in nearest future, and that's the answer:
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Can you see 64bit client? There's PPC client for Mac, but not for linux. We want to fold more than Stanford guys. Making FAH for console will be harder than for stuff I mentioned above, and they haven't done it. It leads to simple conclusion that Stanford guys don't need that much computing power and they're very unlikely to release Xbox360 / PS3 FAH unless under serious pressure.

[Xenocide]

why would they, most of the people who the ps3 and xbox360 is marketed to have never heard of f@h, let alone distributed computing. it would be far too much work for them...

[stratcatprowlin]

I like what Venom said. We wanna fold more than the stanford guys! lol.
Sure Seems like it.

[Mark620]

The only way I would buy one would be if it could fold thousands of points per day....

[orionlion82]

I like what Venom said. We wanna fold more than the stanford guys! lol.
Sure Seems like it.
same as with the Physix and GPU thing.

it makes you wonder if they have more data coming in than they could analyse - which would be suprising, but one never knows how well they may or may not be funded.

[davekusa]

What about memory? I suppose with no OS..........you might not need allot

[tenchi86]

By the time the PS3 comes out the heating issues will be over im sure. Though writing a folding client to work on these would be a lot of work.

[Ven0m]

Xbox360 is powered by seriously boosted PPCs, so in theory making client for it shouldn't be that huge problem. Of course it's not instant process, but it IS doable. But as I said, there is PPC client for MacOS, there is no PPC client for linus, so why whould they make one for Xbox360.
PS3 it completely different thing, it would involve serious code rewriting and tons of work, still doable, but perhaps not worth whole effort. Now lets go back to Xbox360...
It has 3 cores, each 2-threaded with VectorPU. According to my programming knowledge, programming for VPU is completely different than normal processors, but even without that we have 6 computing pipes. Each of them should be much faster than anything used for folding so far. I think that estimating Xbox360 folding power as the fstest single CPU computer x8 or more should be pretty safe, and that's even without vector units. I'm not sure if it's possible, but I'd say pretty possible, that 2-3 Xbox360's with well made FAH clients should beat helsyeah's production, which is the best in our team. 50-60 Xboxes might probably have better production than whole team 32.

That's only "might proably blah blah blah". And you guys know why? 'Cause it won't happen, at least soon. Perhaps Einstein @ home or other distributed computing guys will care more. I'm with FAH as I think it's the best distributed computing project available now. But if they made some nice disitributed computing project (like Einstein at Home) for Xbox360, and console was in acceptable price for me, I'm getting it right when only I'll be able to.

Is making stuff for consoles that hard? I don't know. I'm a programmer but I haven't tried it yet. However I think that if you asked Microsoft / Sony guys, they would help.

[pik4chu]

rofl when I read the title I was thiking Next Gen (http://www.nextgen.com/) and jsut thought to myself OH MY GOD is my job going to suck when someone tries to install F@H on a Nextgen server haahahah :bang head