Folding@Home

[imported_Pemalite]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

I was thinking the ESF community should start a F@H team, And contribute into folding! We could have competitions etc.
And the best thing is it go's to a good cause!

And I'm sure people have several machines lying around that aren't really being used, You can have it as a screen saver, Leave it on over night, And maybe who ever achieves the highest folding score on the ESF site gets forcepit access perhaps?
Just an idea anyway.

 

[frsrblch]

I'm going to just cheer on the quantum computer researchers because I can't afford to leave my computer on all the time. Interesting idea though!

 

[imported_Pemalite]

Some people can and do though I was thinking if people were willing to get involved in this I would build a small folding farm consisting of:
Pentium M 2.0ghz
Pentium 4 1.8Ghz @ 2.7Ghz
Celeron 633
4x Celeron 850's
Duron 1.6
Athlon XP 3000+
Athlon XP 1500+
Athlon XP 1700+
Athlon Thunderbird 1.4ghz
AMD K6-2 500
Pentium 3 450
Pentium 3 500
Pentium 3 550
Celeron 1.2ghz
Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.4ghz
Pentium 3 667
Celeron 800
Cyrix 686 PR300@PR400

And I lost count of the left over Celeron 400's and Socket 370/Slot 1 boards I have laying around. You would be surprised on how little power you can make your computer consume, Turn everything off except for whats in your tower, Under clock your clock speeds on the graphics card, Disable screen savers, sound etc, Under-volt the processor.

 

[Smith|]

Turn everything off except for whats in your tower, Under clock your clock speeds on the graphics card, Disable screen savers, sound etc, Under-volt the processor.

Things 99% of the ESF community wouldn't waste their time doing.

Noble cause, Pemalite, but kind've pointless for ESF.

 

[imported_Pemalite]

Its not required, to under clock, Under volt etc -.- I'm just trying to bring some more life into the forums is all.
Things seem to be slow even with Open Beta running around.
And its not pointless You can just set it up as a screen saver, And it will do its thang!

 

[Smith|]

Well hey, if you want to organize it, go ahead. Don't be surprised if you're alone. And don't be surprised if half of your 'rigs' (the ones with those lower processors) don't output enough ppd to be worthy of assembly .

 

[Jesus]

my Playstation 3 does this for me =]

 

[Ravendust]

Engadget ran an interesting bit on this;

The PS3 accounts for 13% of the CPU's but 73% of the output, that's some processor.

Source.

 

[frsrblch]

Indeed. That's no mean feat.

Although it wouldn't surprise me if lots of those PCs are old.

 

[imported_Pemalite]

But notice the output that the GPU's put out. More powerful than any of the CPU's I know someone who has a Folding farm consisting of JUST pentium Pro's.

 

[frsrblch]

Windows - 1053 per TFLOP
PowerPC - 1263 per TFLOP
Mac (Intel) - 326 per TFLOP (all new, I guess)
Linux - 589 per TFLOP
GPU - 17 per TFLOP
PS3 - 41 per TFLOP

PS3s are good parallel processors, but they're still no match for GPUs.

 

[imported_Pemalite]

I would love it if someone managed to crack the 360 so we could run Folding at home, And I wouldn't mind seeing how it stacked up against the PS3 the 360 has a triple Core Power PC based processor, with each processor able to execute an extra thread, Similar in idea to the Pentium 4/D's Hyper threading. Or even crack the 360' So we could utilize the Graphics card for folding