F@H on GPU's is closer!

TollhouseFrank · Sep 2, 2005

as taken from here: http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-highperformance.html

i bolded and colored the parts that show its almost here!

GROMACS ON GPUs

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. The calculations in FAH could possibly take advantage of GPUs and we have been investigating this with our collaborators Prof. Pat Hanrahan (Stanford University, Computer Science Dept) and Prof. Eric Darve (Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering Dept) and their groups. Prof. Hanrahan's group has pioneered methods for programming GPUs with the Brook streaming computer language and Prof. Darve's group has written many applications using Brook. It is unclear which GPUs will be supported and we don't want to specific list any GPUs at the moment. However, it will likely require the very latest GPUs from NVIDIA or ATI. There is also a possibility that only NVIDIA GPUs will work (they use 32 bit floating point, whereas ATI uses 24 bit).

July 2005 We have a working version of GROMACS on Brook, but are tuning performance.

August 2005 Vishal has made great progress in rewriting the GROMACS inner loops in order to take advantage of more memory. Now, we're tweaking for performance.

Joe Camel · Sep 2, 2005

There is also a possibility that only NVIDIA GPUs will work (they use 32 bit floating point, whereas ATI uses 24 bit)

i "knew" there was a reason i kept this 6800 Ultra sit'n on a shelf for almost a year now

on the other hand, why use a $500 vid card to FOLD when you could get 2x "farm rigs" together for the same $?

on another hand, why do i have a x800pro in a FOLDing / web surfing rig? :shrug:

TollhouseFrank · Sep 2, 2005

because i'm sure they will make super-optimized units available only for GPU folding, and the better your card, the faster it will fold.

it'd also be a great way to 100% tell if your OC on the video card is stable...

Joe Camel · Sep 2, 2005

ya, wont that be great...super optimized WUs for Intel / nVidia rigs while us AMD / ATi users putter along....GRRRRR

edit: [rant] if all my 40+ GHz of FOLDing powah were P4's i could have close to 6000 PPD vs my wonderful 2000 PPD i have now... [/rant]

TollhouseFrank · Sep 2, 2005

i believe they'll make something work for the ati's... those are some fast cards as well... and it'd be a shame to have all that powah wastin'

khiloa · Sep 2, 2005

Thats pretty sweet, put that GPU to use when you are not gaming!

nahmus · Sep 2, 2005

I wonder if this means that you could have 2 clients running on a single machine. 1 for CPU and 1 for GPU.

nice!

Time to break out my hercules ISA cards and kick some arse!

shellshock · Sep 3, 2005

wow, thats pretty sweet. Lol. im gonna get all my old pci vid cards, and fill up every slot on my mobos of my folding rigs, haha :clap:

Quailane · Sep 3, 2005

Joe Camel said:
on another hand, why do i have a x800pro in a FOLDing / web surfing rig?

Yeah, I have the same problem. At least I can claim my gpu is better than all these sorry kids in the dorm playing games all day.

Is there an indication of how much the gpu will do compared to a cpu?

TollhouseFrank · Sep 3, 2005

at this time, not that i've found.

maybe if you could get a beta-tester of it to talk, you could find out more. I've only been able to get publicly available info on this, and it looks REAL close to completion. I'd say by December they'll have a working client out.

petteyg359 · Sep 3, 2005

Joe Camel said:
ya, wont that be great...super optimized WUs for Intel / nVidia rigs while us AMD / ATi users putter along....GRRRRR[/rant]

Huh? Intel/ATI teh sux0rz... AMD/nVidia PWNZ0RZ! You've got the wrong combinations.

Wonder if they'll make a Matrox client... could put my 4MB PCI MGA Millennium to use

But my 6800 should work nicely and I'm trying to get a Ti4600 to replace a Riva TNT...

RoadWarrior · Sep 4, 2005

One of the problems I see with this is that most stock cooling solutions will not cope with 100% GPU load 24/7. I doubt 3Dmark actually loads a GPU fully, it's aimed at hammering certain features, the core probably gets to idle while waiting for the T&L etc.

I think they probably need to release it with a bigass disclaimer saying it will kill your GPU unless you have actively interfered with the cooling solution to improve it.

Otherwise F@H is gonna get a hell of a bad rap/rep with GPUs dieing all over the place.

An undercooled CPU does tend to be demonstrably flaky in other things, even though you could WP on it reliably, however determining that a GPU is not well enough cooled is fairly difficult, on account of real graphics games/apps/benches are probably not using it the same way.

Road Warrior

nahmus · Sep 4, 2005

thats a really good point. Its probably good timing that GPU cooling is now semi mainstream. Had this come out a few years ago it would have been much harder for someone to get a good GPU cooler.

King Warg² · Sep 4, 2005

folding on a GPU...whats next, audio processor folding?

i'll bet that would make playing half life 2 laggy

portorock · Sep 4, 2005

Well, with the advent of the Audigy X-Fi, that just may be a possibility. That sucker even has its own dedicated ram

King Warg² · Sep 5, 2005

aww now my audigy 1 feels obsolete..

Quailane · Sep 5, 2005

King Warg² said:
aww now my audigy 1 feels obsolete..

That's what creative wants you to think!

Oh, and about running the gpu 24/7, it would be fine on any non-overclocked rig. If you are running way overclocked and have folding on it too, you may need a better cooler than stock, but it is very common.

TollhouseFrank · Sep 5, 2005

hey... if i can game HL2 for nearly 36 hours straight (just had a major lan party here over the weekend) and my card doesn't mess up, then i think it can handle folding... lol

pscout · Sep 5, 2005

I am hopin for some ATI support - add a third instance to each of my p4 HT's.

Mr.Guvernment · Sep 5, 2005

Quailane said:
That's what creative wants you to think!

Oh, and about running the gpu 24/7, it would be fine on any non-overclocked rig. If you are running way overclocked and have folding on it too, you may need a better cooler than stock, but it is very common.

No it wouldnt be fine as stated above - your GPU loaded @ %100 24/7?

it is no WHERE near that now - even if you game for hours on end - that is alot of stress.

F@H on GPU's is closer!

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