Most economical way to achieve 1 Thz of folding power?
Tim
Southwest PA Icrontian
Yep, 1 Terahertz. 1000 Gigahertz. All folding away.
I was making plans for what I'd do if I picked up $100 million or so on the PowerBall, and I was thinking about a folding setup of 1 Thz just for something to do. Or at least to keep my mind busy while making my lottery winning plans.
In short, what's the cheapest way to achieve the goal? I think a lot of it comes down to the processor.
Small hard drives, no big deal. Cheap.
512 MB of memory to maybe 1 GB of memory on multiprocessor setups, cheap economy memory should do.
Video cards, something cheap if the motherboard doesn't have on board video. Not much need for a sound card of any kind.
The motherboard only needs to be good enough to handle the processor.
What do we have to pick from? Single and dual core (HT) Pentium 4's, 32 bit AMD Athlons, and the dual core 64 bit AMD CPUs. And heat sinks that can keep the CPUs cool.
Here's where it gets tricky.
Obviously, HT P4s and dual core AMD 64 bit CPUs will be able to run the most seperate folding projects per motherboard assembly, but at what cost? Those chips and the motherboards to support them are much more expensive. And then there are dual socket motherboards.
That makes 2+ Ghz 32 bit Athlons and older 3 Ghz HT P4's more appealing. The motherboards for them are much cheaper.
So it comes down to cost vs speed. Of course, having more motherboards running would require more power supplies, more memory sticks, more hard drives, and more power usage, so that complicates things further.
What do you think?
I was making plans for what I'd do if I picked up $100 million or so on the PowerBall, and I was thinking about a folding setup of 1 Thz just for something to do. Or at least to keep my mind busy while making my lottery winning plans.
In short, what's the cheapest way to achieve the goal? I think a lot of it comes down to the processor.
Small hard drives, no big deal. Cheap.
512 MB of memory to maybe 1 GB of memory on multiprocessor setups, cheap economy memory should do.
Video cards, something cheap if the motherboard doesn't have on board video. Not much need for a sound card of any kind.
The motherboard only needs to be good enough to handle the processor.
What do we have to pick from? Single and dual core (HT) Pentium 4's, 32 bit AMD Athlons, and the dual core 64 bit AMD CPUs. And heat sinks that can keep the CPUs cool.
Here's where it gets tricky.
Obviously, HT P4s and dual core AMD 64 bit CPUs will be able to run the most seperate folding projects per motherboard assembly, but at what cost? Those chips and the motherboards to support them are much more expensive. And then there are dual socket motherboards.
That makes 2+ Ghz 32 bit Athlons and older 3 Ghz HT P4's more appealing. The motherboards for them are much cheaper.
So it comes down to cost vs speed. Of course, having more motherboards running would require more power supplies, more memory sticks, more hard drives, and more power usage, so that complicates things further.
What do you think?
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Comments
I guess I haven't spent too much time thinking of it. I'll probably have more to say once I've mulled it over.
Great mental exercise here, Tim.