Folding@Home Releases GPU Client

SB_SamuraiSam writes, "Today the Folding@Home Group at Stanford University released a client (download here) that allows participants to fold on their ATI 19xx series R580-core graphics cards. AnandTech reports, 'With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.'"

Power usage?

Anybody got an idea of what kind of power constant full speed GPU calculations are likely to burn?

Re:Power usage?

I don't have specifics for that chip, but I would guess 100-150 watts. In both performance-per-cycle and performance-per-watt, it far outstrips using a general-purpose CPU.

20x-40x the performance at 1x-3x the power usage is pretty good.

steve

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Or heat for that matter. My geforce 7900 raises my box temp by 4 degrees C just doing 2d windows xp desktop work. I can't imagine running a gpu at 100% and cpu at 100% for hours on end. Better have good cooling. (granted mine does suck, but stuff).

Re:Power usage?

I can't imagine running a gpu at 100% and cpu at 100% for hours on end.

Clearly, you're not one of the millions with an active WoW subscription.

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It still uses 100%. The the more GPU you have the more FPS you get.

Not really.

Not all the power gets dissipated as heat. Some gets sent down the Internet tubes.

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In a CPU, no actual physical work is done. All the power is dissipated as heat.

I think.

Hey, anybody know the math for this?

Re:Power usage?

Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory. [wikipedia.org]

See also Reversible computing. [wikipedia.org]

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In a CPU, when a node's value goes from 0->1 charge goes from the Vdd supply to various capacitances (gate capacitance, wire cap, a few other smaller sources) and then sits there. When the value goes 1->0, the capacitors discharge to ground. Flippi

Re:Power usage?

The german newsticker heise.de [heise.de] cites 80 watts for a X1900 card while folding.

drawback

the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.

Yeah, but what kind of results do you get if you combine the GPU-accelerated client with a KillerNIC video card? It must at least triple the speed. at least.

Re:argh

* network card. my bad

good, I think...

I like the idea of F@H, but I do worry about 1) opening up my computer to security risks and 2)damaging my computer because the processor (or now GPU) is getting hammered by always being accessed.

Are either of my worries vaild? can it damage it (or speed up its death) and what's the probability of a security threat?

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The capacitors in the power section of your motherboard have a finite life. If you are handy with the soldering iron you can replace these in an afternoon for about $15. I wonder how well the new (to motherboards at least) solid core Capacitors will do.

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Usually, if your GPU runs to hot, your machine will just bluescreen, or reboot, or something along those lines.

Re:good, I think...

You wont damage your card. The GPU's cooling system is rated for keeping the GPU within its thermal design spec at full load, how long you run it doesnt matter as long as there is adequate ventilation. That applies to gaming too, so its not a problem. As to sppeding up its death, your card will become obsolete by the time that happens.

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``your card will become obsolete by the time that happens.''

I don't like that kind of reasoning. If my computer is good enough today, it should be good enough 10 years from now. About the only thing I am willing to concede is that computers aren't always "

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Yes, it'll be 'good enough' 10 years from now, as long as you don't plan to do any more then than you do today. Don't buy any more hardware or software and hope to hell you have no problems.

Face it, computers are one of the fastest changing technologies.

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If my computer is good enough today, it should be good enough 10 years from now.

I hope I just missed your <sarcasm> ... </sarcasm> tags.

Ever hear of Moore's Law?

wikipedia: Moore's Law [wikipedia.org]

Transistor density has been doubling every 24 months

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Next let's quote Bill Gates, "640K should be enough for anyone."

You aren't quoting Bill Gates. You are quoting an urban legend.

Frankly, while I think expecting a computer to have a ten year useful life is a big stretch, but I don't think it is unreasonabl

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And will things like xgl further along the demise of cards even they might be deemed 'obsolete'?

Increasing expectations, not hardware burnout.

You make a very good point.

A computer that does some task today, should -- assuming it wasn't designed to be flawed or have a fixed life expectancy from the very beginning -- still be capable of doing that task in ten years. And for the most part I think this is true; it will.

Most computers that are 10 years old still run fine today (ones that were well-made in the first place); the problem is more one of finding a purpose for them, and then finding software to run on them, then getting them to start. Actually, I would wager that lots of computers that are 20+ years old would still run fine today, depending on how they've been stored and taken care of in the interim.

The problem isn't that machines really "wear out" all that quickly; with some exceptions few do. It's more the relentless drive of increasing expectations that puts working equipment in the landfill. At least for home users; commercial users have their support contracts to worry about, so it's slightly more complicated.

Case in point: I have an Apple IIc in my closet right now, which I know for a fact works fine. I could take it out tomorrow, set it on my desk, put in Apple Write, fire it up and start typing away. Somewhere around I even have a dot-matrix serial printer that I could use to output from it. Everything that Apple advertised that computer as capable of doing, it is just as capable of doing today as it was twenty-one years ago. So why am I not using it? Why am I sitting here with a computer that's only four years old, when I have a perfectly functional computer from 1984 in my closet? It's not because I like spending money. It's because I want to do things that I can't do on an old computer. There are a lot of things that I consider necessities, or at least things that are nice enough to have that I'm willing to pay for them, that weren't possible or even considered more than a few years ago.

If you honestly think that what you can do with a computer today is all you're ever going to want to do -- that you won't see some neat feature on your friend's box in 2014 and decide that you need to have it -- then you're absolutely correct; the computer you have now is the last one you ought to ever have to buy. Realistically though, most people aren't like this; they know that the computer they have today isn't going to be something they're going to want in five or ten years, and they're not willing to pay for a machine that's built to last longer than that.

The things that people use home computers for has changed, and will continue to change, and the tasks that people want to use their computers for will drive the upgrade cycle far faster than the breakdown rate of the components does.

Security Risk? Nope, much safer than games

Folding@Home and similar projects aren't a security risk, as long as they're from trustable sources. They're certainly far safer than the closed-source game software that was the reason you bought a high-end 3-d accelerated video card in the first place. I'd prefer to see projects like that being open-source (at least in the sense of "you can read the source and do anything you want with it", as opposed to the stricter "accepts changes back from the community" part of the model.)

Most of the distributed-computation projects have a very simple communication model - use HTTP to download a chunk of numbers that need crunching, crunch on them for a long time, and use HTTP (PUT or equivalent) to upload the results for that chunk, etc. Works fine through a corporate firewall, and the only significant tracking it's doing is to keep track of the chunks you've worked on for speed/reliability predictions and for the social-network team karma that helps attract participants.

Online games normally have a much more complex communications model - you've got real-time issues, they often want their own holes punched in firewalls, there's user-to-user communication, some of which may involve arbitrary file transfer, and many of the games are effectively a peer-to-peer application server as opposed to the simple client-server model that distributed-computation runs. Fortunately, gamers would never use third-party add-on software to hack their game performance, or share audited-for-malware-safety programs with their buddies, or "share" malware with their rivals, or run DOS or DDOS attacks against other gamers that pissed them off for some reason.....

As far as the effects of running a CPU or GPU at high utilization go, most big problems will show up as temperature, though there may be some subtle effects like RAM-hogging number-crunchers causing your system to page out to disk more often. Not usually a big worry if you're running a temperature monitor to make sure your machine doesn't overheat. Laptop batteries are an entirely separate problem - you really really don't want to be running this sort of application on a laptop on battery power. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when I was commuting by train, and not only did it suck down battery, the extra discharge/recharge cycles really beat up a couple of rounds of NiMH battery packs. Oh - you're also contributing to Global Warming and to the Heat Death of the Universe. But finding cures for major diseases is certainly a reasonable tradeoff, and we'll do that faster if you're using your GPU as opposed to 10 people using general-purpose CPUs.

Probably poor QC

Methinks you got a bad machine. Good that it was under warranty, though.

I've had more than a few crappy machines that I've run at 100% utilization for months or in one case years on end, without catastrophic failures, so I don't think that any consumer mac

Good use of my GPU when idle...

Looks like a good use of my ATI card when I'm not gaming or Google Earthing under Linux. Sweeeet!

Re:Good use of my GPU when idle...

Two problems:

1) There is no Linux GPU client (yet)
2) Many gamers who use Linux have gone nVidia due to driver support. There is no nVidia client (yet)

Wouldn't this be folding at single precision only?

I doubt the GPU can do IEEE double precision floating point.

Is 32 bit precision precision enough for a scientific application
like protein folding?

Is the entire algorithm of folding a big approximation anyway?

Re:Wouldn't this be folding at single precision on

I highly doubt that they use floating point operations, but I could be wrong. Floating point numbers are inherently inaccurate. If I were the FAH team, I would probably be using fixed point, as it's fairly precise.

I might also think that GPUs can handle

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That might be a bit challenging, considering that I don't think that GPUs work very well with fixed-point (or any non-floating point) operations.

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Since we're dealing with measurements (or at least simulated measurements) of the real world, the numbers are always going to be inaccurate. Even in fixed point, errors accumulate. They just accumulate in different ways.

One problem with floating point is t

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Precisely.

Re:Wouldn't this be folding at single precision on

I think newer cards with HDR and stuff like that can handle a bit more than 32-bit floats.

Single precision is fine

You really don't need that many significant digits for most problems. With floating point numbers, 0.00000000005 (about the width of a hydrogen atom in meters) can be expressed as a float or a double, just like 0.5 can. Also consider that all widths and

Folding@home versus Grid.org

IMHO, the work the oxford university/grid .org cancer project is more important than understanding folding. It seems that folding@home is not directly working on producing a cure and they are focusing on understanding "how" something happens.

Check out http [ox.ac.uk]

Re:Folding@home versus Grid.org

I agree. We should stop all science not having a direct impact on cancer until cancer is cured.

Re:Folding@home versus Grid.org

It seems that folding@home is not directly working on producing a cure and they are focusing on understanding "how" something happens.

Understanding how something does or doesn't work is the first step to fixing things. Maybe what is learned by Folding@Home can be applied to solve problems in other areas like cancer.

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Dude, as basic reasearch goes, gaining a better understanding protein folding has a huge number of applications, including, I dare say, finding a cure for cancer.

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Too bad it's Windows only.

Two words: closed architecture

"With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results."

And therein lies the rub. While GPU's are getting more and more like general purpose vector floating point units, they remain closed architectures, unlike CPUs. Only those that can get help from ATI (or Nvidia) need apply to this game.

Re:Two words: closed architecture

That's not necessarily true. It is a relatively new field of computer science, and thus there's not all that much info out there yet. But once you understand the basic concepts of general purpose GPU programming anyone can do it.

What's most likely is that the guys at Stanford started pushing the hardware to the limit, and in ways the driver developers might not have anticipated. Probably what they ran up against was bugs in the driver, and the help came from ATI in terms of ways to work around the bugs. Evidence backs this up from Folding@Home's GPU FAQ:

[You must use] Catalyst driver version 6.5 or version 6.10, but not any other versions: 6.6 and 6.7 will work, but at a major performance hit; 6.8 and 6.9 will not work at all.

Your next question might be, if that's true then why use ATI (who are known for poor driver quality)... it might simply be a matter of that's the hardware they had to test with, so that's what they needed to use.

At any rate, it's definitely possible to get started doing GPU programming without vendor support.

There's even some API's out there to help... The Brook C API (for doing multiprocessor programming) has a GPU version out called BrookGPU: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/ind ex.html [stanford.edu]

There's even a fairly large community of people using Nvidia's own Cg library for doing general purpose stuff.

There's also GPUSort (source code available to look at), which is a high performance sorting example that uses the GPU to do the sorting, and it trounces the fastest CPUs: http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html [unc.edu]

And last but not least there's the GPGPU site that is a great resource for all sorts of general purpose computing the GPUs: http://www.gpgpu.org/ [gpgpu.org]

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If GPU-assisted code ever gets turned into a 'selling point' for graphics cards, you can be sure it'll be opened up more.

Only X1900s?

Damn, and I've got a 9600XT just sitting on a shelf.

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I knew someone'd say that.

It's got a broken CRTC, no red channel in the output plus the image is smeared. If it worked (without causing blinding headaches after 5 minutes) I wouldn't be using this MX400 :)

Mac Support

Sadly, Mac support is still lacking. I've got a Mac Pro with x1900xt, and I'd be happy to donate, but it runs in OS X 99% of the time, so I have to run it emulated, and I can't do the graphics card thing. Any idea when a Universal version (and/or a GPU v

GPU code samples?

Anyone know where I can find good starting places for GPU coding? Our Vectorspace engine would really benefit from that kind of power... I'd love to learn more about it.

charitable donations

Is there any way I can use this to make my next graphics card purchase tax deductable?

Good for ATI

I predict that this new client that runs on ATI hardware will cause a spike in sales of their products. I, for one, will be trying to get this card for my computer so that I can improve the rate that folding@home runs on my system. And I'm certain that others have the same intention.

If you think about that, it says something about us that I think is important; people want to help and they're willing to spend their money to be helpful.

The concept of voluntary grid computing is a curious one. Why do people do this? Surely one more little CPU grinding away at a huge problem won't make a difference. Yet even though we all know this, we do it anyway. The result of this collective hopefulness and helpfulness is tangible. But what else is strange is that so little notice is given to grid computing. I don't recall hearing about it on CNN or any other news television program. SETI gets air time because it's so, well, 'out there', but the folding, aids, cancer/find-a-drug stuff is operating in obscurity.

BTW, kudos to Slashdot for helping get the word out. I first heard about grid computing here.

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As an engineering student being forced as part of my degree to do a boat load of math I would hazard a guess that the crazy fucked up world of mathematics has a way to carry out double precision fp ops by transforming the problem into a vector of hundreds

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FYI --

1. SSE vectors are 128 bits -- that's two doubles, not eight. [There may be 8 sse registers, but that doesn't mean you can do 8 simultanous sse operations.]
2. It's possible to extend precision using single-single "native pair" arithmetic. There's a

Re:Am I the only idiot?

They're studying the folds of protiens. All protiens are made of chains of amino acids, but usually more than one chain, and they're folded and twisted in a precise way in order to perform their functions. Think of them as a cell's nanomachines. Some of them are so large and complicated that it takes quite a bit of CPU power to calculate how they will fold.