What is Digg?377 Comments
- inactive, on 08/12/2008, -42/+756...but will it run Crysis? :-D
- mark076h, on 08/12/2008, -2/+217For those of you who don't know what is going on here or why this guy would put together all those video cards,
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@Home
"Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. "
"Folding@home (sometimes abbreviated as FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness, and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases." - inactive, on 08/13/2008, -12/+208Serious question here.....How do you interlink all those motherboards to act as one? What type of software do you use to control it?
- proliance, on 08/12/2008, -0/+171I fold in memory of my grandfather who passed away from cancer. I've been folding for years (since I gave up on wasting my time searching for aliens) and I'm currently using a 9800gtx+ that I picked up last week. Its good for about 6000 points per day and I'm actually concerned about my energy bill.
This guy is serious. His team, OCN, is currently ranked 16th, and he personally picked up almost 165,000 points in the last 24 hours. Just wow. - cornerback42, on 08/12/2008, -0/+142Damn, thats expensive.
- inactive, on 08/13/2008, -21/+157Wow Digg, good job Digging down someone with a legitimate question.
Had it been some lame witty remark, used up meme, or ascii art, I would've been Dugg up.
***** suckers. - Veni_Vidi_Vici, on 08/12/2008, -6/+139Nah.
- Dantetheinferno, on 08/13/2008, -0/+114GPUs are highly parallel and can do many simple calculations at once. CPUs are less parallel but can do more complex calculations. GPUs are also increasing in computing power far more than CPUs currently.
- mickstephenson, on 08/13/2008, -1/+68He is a ***** hero is what he is, he makes me feel bad for devoting my cpu time to SETI
- Niubai, on 08/13/2008, -6/+69No computer made by human hands can run crysis at this moment. We need to wait some more decades or go for alien technology to witness all the splendor of the game.
- Radica1Faith, on 08/13/2008, -4/+66But can it cure cancer?
- camiller, on 08/13/2008, -1/+63He doesn't, he runs 51 instances of the GPU folding client. And if those motherboards have multi-core CPUs he might also run a few CPU folding clients as well.
- MrRuslan, on 08/13/2008, -1/+61They do not work as one.
- Virgule, on 08/13/2008, -3/+57OK. What is a PPD?
BTW I want to see his power bill. o_O - foxhound009, on 08/12/2008, -20/+61hmm.. u crazy or something ? we need an super computer from faaar future like year 2154 to play crysis.
- Volstraav, on 08/13/2008, -1/+42It's a little known fact that the NX-01 was actually built not to roam the galaxy, but to finally run crysis on max specs.
- afrothunderman, on 08/13/2008, -1/+40Yeah, we should measure computing power in terms of crysis. My laptop is 0.00001 crysis.
- Natfly, on 08/13/2008, -0/+34"What is the big push for using Graphics Cards (GPU's) for power processing? What ever happened to getting CPU's?"
It depends on the type of data and processing that needs to be done. CPUs are great for general purpose computing with few threads. GPUs on the other hand are processors with a very specific type of processing in mind, hundreds of parallel floating point calculations. The data F@H processes fits much more in line with GPU type processing and in turn is a much more efficient way of folding. - diggmaddy, on 08/13/2008, -3/+35You do realize that this is Digg and not /., right?
FYI, I dugg the serious question. - CATSCEO2, on 08/13/2008, -2/+34What the ***** is wrong with you?
- schnikies79, on 08/13/2008, -5/+35I used to fold on all my computers, until I saw my electricity bill make a big jump, and I have some of the cheapest electricity rates in the nation. That was the end of that.
Now all but one go into S3 standby after being inactive for 20mins. - normalkid0615, on 08/13/2008, -16/+45What is the big push for using Graphics Cards (GPU's) for power processing? What ever happened to getting CPU's?
- ferrariman60, on 08/13/2008, -0/+28it's most likely "Points Per Day." And this is a huge number of ppd. absolutely insane. overclock.net is currently 17th in the team rankings, but I promise you they are going to take over a few positions with the help of this thing, this is damn huge.
- GawtMilk, on 08/13/2008, -0/+26I wonder the cost effectiveness over this versus buying 51 Playstations. That would be $25,000 or so.
Buying that many 8800GS's, motherboards, etc - did he mention the overall price? - TheMajikMan, on 08/13/2008, -0/+26You don't know how universities work, do you?
Endowments are not money to be spent. It is money that is given by donors to create a a pool of money to be invested and the money that came from investment can be spent to further the university. It is illegal to spend the endowment.
And if you think a college degree isn't worth anything in the job market, you should try to get a job without. I know it happens, but it ain't easy and you generally have to go through a lot of crap to get there. - arch3r, on 08/13/2008, -4/+27I for one welcome our folding farm overlords.
- JonRSC, on 08/13/2008, -1/+24I think that should be "Cryses" ;)
- inactive, on 08/13/2008, -3/+26I think it will run 10 crysis.
- tomz17, on 08/13/2008, -1/+23Yeah... wait until he sees his electricity bill! That's dozens of Kilowatts right there!
- Colindean, on 08/13/2008, -4/+25Folding is a great project, but it needs more attention. Lots more attention.
I had a nine machine cluster folding in 2005-2006 and broke into the top 1000 within ~3 months, losing approximately one machine per week to deployment (they were unused machines). Having only one machine remaining in the team since approximately February 2006, a machine which is always on at my parents' house, the team slipped only to 1,885th place.
The project needs more dedicated folks like this guy. - mif86, on 08/13/2008, -0/+20Yeah, and in a few years you'll probably get the same performance from a single budget card :)
- AngelBunny, on 08/13/2008, -0/+20it depends what you're doing but a normal core series from intel will pull about 1Gflop per core, give-or-take, (i think 2 actually, but whatever).
if I remember right an 8800 can go about 60Gflops of math so 1 gfx card can do about 10x the amount of math a cpu currently can give-or-take. however, most programs are not math intensive so using the gpu is pointless. most programs are memory intensive actually. math intensive programs are video games, video-audio encoding/decoding, 3d animation rendering, benchmarks, and things like folding @home. other than that most other programs use more memory than they do math so the bottleneck is transferring the data than actually converting it from one form to the other (aka math), so even if CPUs do speed things up a lot the truth is the true speed comes from offloading the work from the CPU. in the p3 days copying files from one folder to another used the CPU to do it. today the cpu doesn't deal with it and is offloaded elsewere, so speed increases in generations today usually come from DMA related stuff (direct memory access) which skips the cpu entirely. this is why the amd 64 when it came out was like 10x quicker than the next fastest cpu because of the lack of the cpu needing to be used. today the speed problems are memory related. moving to solid state hard drives helps that a lot, but the sdram is dirt slow. intel is working that out by making giant cache sizes, but in the end that doesn't do much when you're running an OS with multiple programs at once. to seriously speed things up for the next big jump in computing the memory needs to be linked to the cpu better some how, if that is even possible. however, one of the advantages a gpu provides no one really takes advantage of yet is how the memory on the gpu is faster than the memory on the mobo so if you are using something that is memory intensive and isn't a small task like running an sql server, lets say, then the db could be offloaded to the gpu memory and processing would be quicker cuz the memory is quicker. however, the pipeline between the gpu and the mobo is slower making the advantage nonexcistent and that is why people haven't taken advantage of this yet.
sorry, i started babbling /geek - schnikies79, on 08/13/2008, -0/+18In defense of an endowment, you should already know that they can't spend it if they wanted to.
An endowment is usually required by the donor to be invested (and not spent) and the institution is required to follow their wishes. - Phocion55, on 08/13/2008, -7/+25Geek fuse just blew in my brain. Need a nap.
- Plower, on 08/13/2008, -3/+21***** you, two of my friends died in a crysis.
- commenter01, on 08/13/2008, -0/+18This is his explanation:
[Originally Posted by repo_man
Nitteo, if I may be so bold (read: nosey ) what is your occupation to supply such a generous hobby?]
"I fight cancer on two fronts, my business and folding.
I own a Home Care Business where I send nurses to homes to care for the elderly AT THEIR homes. One aspect of my business is we take care of Chemo-Therapy patients at home also. We take care of their ailments while on Chemo.
In Miami, my parents own a Hospice Company, where they send Nurses to take care of patients on their last months of life. Those deemed to have less than 6 months to live.
This is where I get my passion for Folding from. Seeing/hearing/talking and interacting with people who suffer from all these diseases makes you want to do something about it." - lennybird, on 08/13/2008, -2/+20Dante,
So you're saying that GPU's have a wider bandwidth, but a slower speed - thus more "light" calculations can be processed at once...? - MindTrigger, on 08/13/2008, -0/+17It might interest you to know, douche, that Digg started out with mostly technology related news. It's only been the last couple years that it turned into the kind of place that attracts intellectually stunted people like you. I see from your profile that you joined Digg about 37 seconds ago. Go back to MySpace.
- jaksu, on 08/13/2008, -1/+18NO
- JT114881, on 08/13/2008, -3/+20You're doing it wrong.
- FlimBlimmer, on 08/13/2008, -3/+19Dugg for the massive insult at the end.
- 1Bad, on 08/13/2008, -0/+16GPUs are designed to do massive amounts of floating point calculations really quickly, computer graphics are almost entirely dependent on floating point calculations. Apparently, Folding is also highly dependent on floating point calculations.
- Elshender, on 08/13/2008, -3/+18Or would it be Crisi? Like cactus and cacti.
- Magnolit, on 08/13/2008, -1/+16"You don't get credit on the PS3 OS"
What do you mean by that?
You can always use custom usernames if you want . - jaydoj, on 08/13/2008, -1/+15I have no idea, but because of this forum I'm learing a lot about something I had no idea even existed. Sorry they dugg you down...you've got my vote
- elfprince13, on 08/13/2008, -3/+17Ethernet cable and the folding@home client ;)
- zzzBrett, on 08/13/2008, -0/+13Yes
- cardyology, on 08/13/2008, -8/+20I had two friends who were killed by a 51-card folding farm....
- raydeen, on 08/13/2008, -6/+18I smell Skynet 0.9a. ;) Heck of a project this is. Good job.
- camiller, on 08/13/2008, -0/+11Yes
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