alpha cpus and folding?

[arkan]

ive read that folding is more floating point based than seti is so i was wondering if anyone had ever considered putting together a dec alpha system for that purpose? you can find them relativly cheap on ebay and elsewhere and a 500 mhz alpha scores better than the fastest amd or intel cpus out at the moment in the SPECfpu benchmarks. it wouldnt be that difficult to put a 4 way alpha system to work floding if they make a version of the software for it. does anyone know iof they do bc id hate to waste such an awesome computer.

 

[David]

ive read that folding is more floating point based than seti is so i was wondering if anyone had ever considered putting together a dec alpha system for that purpose? you can find them relativly cheap on ebay and elsewhere and a 500 mhz alpha scores better than the fastest amd or intel cpus out at the moment in the SPECfpu benchmarks. it wouldnt be that difficult to put a 4 way alpha system to work floding if they make a version of the software for it. does anyone know iof they do bc id hate to waste such an awesome computer.

Email stanford about it or check out the relevant Yahoo discussion groups. It also depends what OS you are running. There must be an x86 emulator somewhere.

 

[arkan]

but emulation would kill the true power of this type of chip it does floating point arithmatic better than any othger cpu i could possibly get my hands on i know they make a seti client for both linux and windows nt alpha but no one seems to know if they make one for folding its a shame too

 

[David]

but emulation would kill the true power of this type of chip it does floating point arithmatic better than any othger cpu i could possibly get my hands on i know they make a seti client for both linux and windows nt alpha but no one seems to know if they make one for folding its a shame too

Try emailing them - they may compile it for Alpha for you. You can but try...

 

[Kaliban]

There is an x86 emulator called fx!32 for the Alpha running WNT4 O/S. Works pretty well, but probably not as good as a client compiled for the Alpha processor itself.

You can download fx!32 from here.

 

[David]

There is an x86 emulator called fx!32 for the Alpha running WNT4 O/S. Works pretty well, but probably not as good as a client compiled for the Alpha processor itself.

You can download fx!32 from here.

Looks like it would work, but would it restrict the power of the CPU at all? ie. use CPU power to run emulator?

 

[arkan]

alphas seem rather sensative to different compilers ive seen the compaq compiler producew code that was up to 30 percent faster than gcc for alpha when it came to floating pint intensive programs