Folding@home GPU2 Beta Released, Examined

ThinSkin writes "Stanford has recently released an update to their Folding@home GPU-accelerated client, which includes notable upgrades such as support for more current Radeon graphics cards and even a visualizer to see what's going on. ExtremeTech takes a good look at the new Folding@home GPU2 client and interviews Director Dr. Vijay Pande about the project. To the uninitiated, Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which hundreds of thousands of PCs and PS3s devote a portion of their computing power to crunch chunks of biological data. The goal is 'to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.'"

Global Warming!

Just think of all the global warming caused by all those CPU's and GPU's cranking away day and night! And all that electricity used! The horror! They are making Al Gore cry!

(I am joking, for those of you who are humor impaired)

Re:Global Warming!

you should start a StopGlobalWarming@Home project, where spare CPU cycles go towards global warming research.

Re:Global Warming!

Your ideas are relevant to my interests. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Global Warming!

" . . read up on "Sleep Mode"."

Perhaps later. Too tired now. *yawn*.

Re:

This is built into most OSes already, read up on "Sleep Mode".

That's great, but Folding@Home doesn't work too well when the machine is asleep.

Re:Global Warming!

You shouldn't be joking.

Folding @ Home on a PS3 costs the average participant around $150-200 year in electricity if they run it 24x7. Up to $400+ in places where electricity is more expensive. PCs average less, but only because so many of them are lower power, while all PS3s are high wattage.

I think its a worthwhile project, but the electricity people are donating isn't free and F@H uses a lot more electricity than most people think. "Oh, I've got my PC on anyway", or "Oh it can't be as much as my fridge." both of which are mistaken, your fridge uses a fraction of what a PS3 running F@H does, and even if your PC is on, running at idle or going to sleep uses a LOT less power than maxxing out the cpu and/or gpu 24x7.

A PS3 running @ 280W 24x7 for a year:

280W x 24h/d x 365d/y = 2452800 Watt-hours/year or 2452 kWh/y

at $@.12/kWh that'll cost you: $294.00 / year

Then multiply that by the number of PC's running it... it adds up fast.

Like I said, its a good program and a good cause, BUT its not free. A kid/teen shouldn't be running it without a parents permission and understanding of the cost.

I don't like the F@H 'propaganda' because I think its somewhat deceptive about the costs. Its relying on peoples attitude that their free cpu time is truly free to prevent them thinking about the real costs. If you probe they don't lie about the costs, but ethically they really should be more upfront about them.

And now that there is money involved, I should choose the best use of it. When I'm faced with a decision of choosing the best place to donate $300 I think their are other causes more worthy of my money than F@H. But that's a personal choice. If you want to donate to F@H, by all means do so.

One final issue - generally when you donate more than $10-20 to charity you get a tax receipt. $150-500 quite a bit more than $10.

Re:

My tongue was only half in my cheek. I stopped running any and all distributed clients a couple of years ago precisely because of the resultant power/CPU utilization. I didn't do it for the environment though as I alluded to in my joke. I did it to save

Re:Global Warming!

It seems that the PS3 40 GB consumes only half of what you said (135 Watts, see http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/30/40gb-ps3-features-65nm-chips-lower-power-consumption/ [engadget.com]).

So you can go and buy a second PS3.

Re:Global Warming!

Thanks! You are right.

There was information when the PS3/F@H launched that consumption was 280-300W, but apparently that was actually around 200-220W so my post above was out by ~$70, and now with the newer lower wattage PS3s the price comes down even more.

But even at 135W, assuming the same .12c kWh I used in my original post that's ~$150/year. Maybe not a big deal to some, but how many would still sign up if they had to pay $150 to f@h directly instead of having it nickle and dime them daily on their power bill? I suspect the user count would be orders of magnitude lower.

Re:

slow update though....

Re:

Not really, it does more FLOPS but it generates less usable scientific data which is reflected in the PPD it gets, the SMP client (multiprocessor) is the client that gives them the most research value and thus is worth the most currently. Also, the GPU cli

Re:

Accounting for the electricity cost is your problem, but they should provide the details of who you donated it to that is needed for tax purposes.

They would need to be registered charity though, for taxes. You can't just say you donated money to X and call

Re:Global Warming!

hm.. this way you're directly investing in 'new' science, and you know what the goal is..

Fair enough. But its a little dishonest if you don't REALIZE how much you are invested. That's my biggest issue. Once people know what it costs I have no issue if they're still willing to contribute. But it bugs me, especially since I beleive the a very significant proportion of the people contributing to F@H are not the one's paying the bills.

The other part is how much do F@H results actually cost, in aggregate? Is it good value for the science produced? They've consumed between $50 and 100 million in electricity. Could they have made better progress towards their goals if they were given the money directly? At the very least if they built their own super computer and managed the costs directly the waste would be far far less.

Not only would they be paying industrial rates for electricity instead of residential rates, they'd also be using far less of it because they'd have racks of CPUs not all powering hard drives, and what not needlessly.

Hell, just take a look at the from their site: (For the purposes of this I've assumed that it costs 'volunteers' on average $10 to run a cpu per month in electricty.)

190,000 PCs generating 182 TFLOPs. 191k cpus. Total Cost ~1.9M/month. ~$10,494/TFLOP/month
  41,000 PS3 generating 1257 TFLOPs. 41k cpus. Total Cost ~0.4M/month. ~$326/TFLOP/month

What moron would keep the PCs running?

A final note about overhead. You lose 10-20% efficiency right off the top with F@H due to the lack a tax receipt. I can donate $250 to a registered charity at the same cost to me as buying $200 worth of electricty due to the taxes. Or conversely when you donate $200 to F@H -you- pay an extra 20-50 in taxes vs had you given the same $200 to a registered charity.

but if i had to choose, and if i had a choice, i'd rather invest in an @home project.. i find it a lot more intrinsically motivating than knowing i'm keeping a statistic alive that in 10-20 years might start earning their country some money through taxation because he's had his K-6 education.

Between those two I'm inclined to agree. I tend to mostly donate to small local organizations myself.

Re:Global Warming!

Unless its winter. In that case 100% of the energy going into your computer is going towards heating your house. Sure electricity is more expensive than gas, but it'll drastically change your numbers for winter months.

I do the laundry once a week

I've been doing Folding @ Home for most of my adult life. I fold shirts, pants, underwear, etc. etc.

Support for NVIDIA GPUs coming?

From the article:

ET: Whenever someone hears about GPU-accelerated FAH, their first question is why there is no client with support for Nvidia cards. In the past it was said that it had more to do with Nvidia's drivers. Now that the core doesn't use DirectX, couldn't a GPU client use Nvidia's CUDA? Is there any work going on there, and if not, why not? Dr. Pande: We are interested in CUDA and are investigating how well FAH on CUDA would work.

I am awaiting this with some serious excitement. Getting Folding@home working on Nvidia GPUs would definitely add a lot of computing power into the mix. This is especially true now, as it seems that the current crop of high end GPUs seems to favor Nvidia.

From the benchmarks I have seen, it seems that there are currently no games that can effectively utilize, for example, 2 9800 GX2s. If Folding@home releases an Nvidia client, those people who have plunked $1000 into graphics cards may finally be able to put them to use!

Re:

The first thought that comes to mind is whether the 8xxx and newer with the stream processors would need a completely different programming approach compared to the prior models. This being /., who wants to be first to pretend to know the answer?

Re:Support for NVIDIA GPUs coming?

Yes

Re:Support for NVIDIA GPUs coming?

No

Re:Support for NVIDIA GPUs coming?

Here is a post from the Nvidia/CUDA forums from Mike Houston, one of the Folding at Home people: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=28868&view=findpost&p=224490 [nvidia.com]

Ati Only

From TFA, interestingly this bypasses DirectX and interfaces with the card directly (I guess you'd want to, to throw maths at it instead of vertices)

However it only runs on R600-based Ati cards right now. It also requires .Net framework. They do say they're "investigating" an nVidia version, but that sounds a while away.

Interestingly also, it claims to parallelize processing the atoms, so it must use the individual stream processors on the graphics card directly.

Translation of "protein folding related diseases."

"to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."

FYI: This means Prions related diseases => Mad cow disease

Idea: F@H to help filter spam?

So, here's my thought - before someone sends an email, they contact Folding@Home, identify themselves, say who they want to send an email to, and the contents of the email. F@H gives them a work unit. When they complete it, F@H signs their email. Your email client can filter emails based on how many work units the sender did to send it to you. If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two. If it's a casual email, one work unit will do. Maybe even a fraction of a work unit.

That way, if you read spam, at least you know that you contributed to F@H. If you want less spam, you turn up your threshold for how many work units the sender has to do.

Re:Doing this at work?

Better check up on power consumption there, factor in 124 hours a week at 240 watts (conservative) x150 machines. Take a look at how much money your company is "donating" in raw power consumption, then triple it, cause for every watt of heat dissipated, it takes 2 watts of AC to remove it. See if your CEO approves of that donation to FAH that he can't even write off for tax purposes. (no receipt)

Re:Doing this at work?

There's a HUGE difference between an idle computers power consumption and ones whose CPU and RAM throughput are being taxed to the limit by a process like folding. The 240 watts I mentioned is just the CPU, northbridge, RAM, and internal heat evacuation. Drives and monitor are completely irrelevant.

You execs are right to dismiss the notion of shutting down a computer thats idle. It's NOT consuming much. However, when that same computer is crunching foldings numbers for it.... THAT is a huge cost.