Which GPUs will be supported? We have not made any final decisions on this issue. However, our software will likely require the very latest GPUs from ATI (especially now that the newest ATI GPUs support 32 bit floating point operations). Previous work of ours used NVIDIA GPUs as well, but we have now concentrated on ATI GPU's as they allow for significant performance increases for FAH over NVIDIA's GPU's (at least at the current generation). Our GPU cluster has 25 1900XT's and 25 1900 XTX's. We find a considerable performance increase of 1900XT's even over 1800XT's, due to the architectural differences between the R580 and R520 GPU's. Our code will run on R520's, but considerably more slowly than R580. We're very much looking forward to trying out R600's.
I believe the R580 has a lot of potential due to the large number of pipelines in the design. Makes sense, as the R580 is really powerful when it comes to physics computations as well--probably not far off from F@H WU crunching.
What is this talk of "100 gigaflops", and how does that relate to Mhz and Ghz CPU ratings and performance?
If you are folding on the video card, could you also be folding on the CPU?
And what about when you need the full use of the video card for games?
I just saw something somewhere that said the Sony PS3 could fold when it comes out, or something like that. I have an Xbox (not a 360) for playing Halo 2.
What is this talk of "100 gigaflops", and how does that relate to Mhz and Ghz CPU ratings and performance?
FLOPS refers to a Floating-point Operation per Second, or how many mathematical computations (Pure integer calculation/number-crunching) per second a CPU can produce. A standard benchmark for this is LINPACK; while this is an obscure rating system, it's often used as a standard of performance for scientific applications where it's a pretty accurate metric as to how well the CPU will perform. A gigaflop is 1,000,000,000 (1 bil.) floating point operations. 100 GFLOPS = 100,000,000,000 or 100 billion float. ops. The FLOPS capacity of a CPU is determined by a variety of things, including the efficiency of the floating point unit, the pipeline of the CPU, the cache, and its I/O capacity (Hypertransport vs. V-LINK).
If you are folding on the video card, could you also be folding on the CPU?
Yes.
And what about when you need the full use of the video card for games?
I imagine it would back down on the GPU just like it goes down to almost nothing on a CPU when you queue up active tasks to do on the CPU version of F@H.
I just saw something somewhere that said the Sony PS3 could fold when it comes out, or something like that. I have an Xbox (not a 360) for playing Halo 2.
They were talking about this years ago. Now I guess GPU power is to the point where they can send enough data and do it fast enough compared to CPUs that is worth complete development.
Comments
"But mom, it's for cancer!"
Gonna be a tough sell, but I'll try.
Heartbreaking.
That's how I got her to approve the dual core for her rig.
If you are folding on the video card, could you also be folding on the CPU?
And what about when you need the full use of the video card for games?
I just saw something somewhere that said the Sony PS3 could fold when it comes out, or something like that. I have an Xbox (not a 360) for playing Halo 2.
FLOPS refers to a Floating-point Operation per Second, or how many mathematical computations (Pure integer calculation/number-crunching) per second a CPU can produce. A standard benchmark for this is LINPACK; while this is an obscure rating system, it's often used as a standard of performance for scientific applications where it's a pretty accurate metric as to how well the CPU will perform. A gigaflop is 1,000,000,000 (1 bil.) floating point operations. 100 GFLOPS = 100,000,000,000 or 100 billion float. ops. The FLOPS capacity of a CPU is determined by a variety of things, including the efficiency of the floating point unit, the pipeline of the CPU, the cache, and its I/O capacity (Hypertransport vs. V-LINK).
Yes.
I imagine it would back down on the GPU just like it goes down to almost nothing on a CPU when you queue up active tasks to do on the CPU version of F@H.
Ya. PS3 will fold.