Folding@home Hits PS3

[GLeeM]

Originally posted by: IeraseU
Yes I downloaded the application for a rough comparison on my PC, and the PS3 is much faster.

Hello and welcome to all the new PS3 folders!

Sorry IeraseU, but your comparison is rougher than you might think

The WUs for the PC client can be different sizes, from a few hours long to many days to finish. Of course, the longer it takes the more points you get (normally).

But in a sense, you are correct in that the PS3 is supposed to do lots of science for each WU done. It does a special for PS3 type of computation that would take much longer on a PC. They still need PCs though to do all the other types of WU calculations.

 

[Extelleron]

My first PS3 WU has 400,000 frames and is scheduled to end in around an hour- so a total of 8~ hours for the WU. The PS3 does really fly but there are also much more frames... my PC WU's are usually around 5,000 frames and right now I have one that is 20,000 frames.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

Originally posted by: Extelleron
My first PS3 WU has 400,000 frames and is scheduled to end in around an hour- so a total of 8~ hours for the WU. The PS3 does really fly but there are also much more frames... my PC WU's are usually around 5,000 frames and right now I have one that is 20,000 frames.

Different types of units. Much more work is getting done by doing more frames on the PS3. Different kinds of calculations that would just be far too time consuming on regular PCs.

I got 186 points it seems for my first unit. For units that take 6-8 hours, I'm quite alright with that. Too it doesn't do work in the background though. I'll end up using it alot to play Oblivion for a while, because that's what I really got my PS3 for.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: BobDaMenkey

Originally posted by: Extelleron
My first PS3 WU has 400,000 frames and is scheduled to end in around an hour- so a total of 8~ hours for the WU. The PS3 does really fly but there are also much more frames... my PC WU's are usually around 5,000 frames and right now I have one that is 20,000 frames.

Different types of units. Much more work is getting done by doing more frames on the PS3. Different kinds of calculations that would just be far too time consuming on regular PCs.

I got 186 points it seems for my first unit. For units that take 6-8 hours, I'm quite alright with that. Too it doesn't do work in the background though. I'll end up using it alot to play Oblivion for a while, because that's what I really got my PS3 for.

It hasn't even been that long yet, and I think I've now used my PS3 more for folding than gaming.

 

[Bateluer]

I doubt there's any chance of F@H clients coming out for other consoles, is there?

 

[IeraseU]

It looks like PS3 is now putting out double the teraflops for F@H in comparison to PC's. This is even with much lower numbers of PS3's out there. Here is the link:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats


Very impressive.


Edit: I just realized this is my 323rd post and the date today is 3-23. Cool.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

Originally posted by: IeraseU
It looks like PS3 is now putting out double the teraflops for F@H in comparison to PC's. This is even with much lower numbers of PS3's out there. Here is the link:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats


Very impressive.


Edit: I just realized this is my 323rd post and the date today is 3-23. Cool.

Double the Tflops with one tenth the systems, that's awesome.

And I think the point value for the units is higher actually, because I got a double hit on odd point values I've not seen before. 302(amber?) and 287(supervillin?) points for the 2 units that I've already turned in. My PCs haven't chucked in anything yet, so I think that's the real deal.

Originally posted by: Bateluer
I doubt there's any chance of F@H clients coming out for other consoles, is there?

The only other one that it would be feasable to harness would be the 360. The Wii just doesn't have the power to fold, it's a half step up from a gamecube as far as power goes. And I doubt the 360 will get a client, it doesn't have the raw kind of power that the Cell processor does. It's a good console, but really it'd be like a triple core PPC clocked in the 3ghz range. It'd be good for some folding, but nothing near as fast as the Cell or GPU clients. (These are my relatively uneducated guesses though)

 

[Thraxen]

So all I have to do is enter 198 for the team to join Anandtech's team?

 

[BobDaMenkey]

Yep.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: BobDaMenkey

Originally posted by: IeraseU
It looks like PS3 is now putting out double the teraflops for F@H in comparison to PC's. This is even with much lower numbers of PS3's out there. Here is the link:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats


Very impressive.


Edit: I just realized this is my 323rd post and the date today is 3-23. Cool.

Double the Tflops with one tenth the systems, that's awesome.

And I think the point value for the units is higher actually, because I got a double hit on odd point values I've not seen before. 302(amber?) and 287(supervillin?) points for the 2 units that I've already turned in. My PCs haven't chucked in anything yet, so I think that's the real deal.

Originally posted by: Bateluer
I doubt there's any chance of F@H clients coming out for other consoles, is there?

The only other one that it would be feasable to harness would be the 360. The Wii just doesn't have the power to fold, it's a half step up from a gamecube as far as power goes. And I doubt the 360 will get a client, it doesn't have the raw kind of power that the Cell processor does. It's a good console, but really it'd be like a triple core PPC clocked in the 3ghz range. It'd be good for some folding, but nothing near as fast as the Cell or GPU clients. (These are my relatively uneducated guesses though)

Actually I think the 360 would be a very good idea to release F&H on. The 360 has the R500 GPU which would be able to do the same kind of folding the R580's can do- it has 48 shader processors and enough power to do well. Combining a 3-core processor and a (somewhat) R600-based GPU is going to make a powerful combination. The PS3 has a processor which is very, very good at folding tasks... sadly the RSX can't help (except in rendering the on-screen visuals). The Wii, obviously, would be useless for folding; a modern PC has much more power than it.

 

[Wellcky]

mii want for the wii

 

[CupCak3]

uhm my 360 runs hot and loud enough as it... I don't think i'd run FAH on it anytime soon. If only MS has beefed up the quality a bit...

 

[Tegeril]

Originally posted by: Extelleron
My first PS3 WU has 400,000 frames and is scheduled to end in around an hour- so a total of 8~ hours for the WU. The PS3 does really fly but there are also much more frames... my PC WU's are usually around 5,000 frames and right now I have one that is 20,000 frames.

The Windows SMP client keeps giving me 500,000 frame WUs, but the points are so good - 1523 per WU. It finishes one in less than a day - could probably get 2 if I ran it 24/7, but I like using my computer too.

Looking at the post below, I'm pretty shocked the PS3 only gets 186 points. They seriously hampered its point gaining abilities beyond what I would think is reasonable.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: Tegeril

Originally posted by: Extelleron
My first PS3 WU has 400,000 frames and is scheduled to end in around an hour- so a total of 8~ hours for the WU. The PS3 does really fly but there are also much more frames... my PC WU's are usually around 5,000 frames and right now I have one that is 20,000 frames.

The Windows SMP client keeps giving me 500,000 frame WUs, but the points are so good - 1523 per WU. It finishes one in less than a day - could probably get 2 if I ran it 24/7, but I like using my computer too.

Looking at the post below, I'm pretty shocked the PS3 only gets 186 points. They seriously hampered its point gaining abilities beyond what I would think is reasonable.

186 points? I get 900~ppd when I leave my PS3 on 24/7.. so that's 3wu/day, 300points per wu.

 

[CupCak3]

Extelleron is correct.

Tegeril: you could get around 1.5-2x your PPD if you ran the linux client in vmware

 

[Tegeril]

I must have misread about the 186 thing - nevermind about that then. As for VMWare/Linux performance, is it expected that the Windows client performance will increase?

 

[GLeeM]

Originally posted by: Tegeril
I must have misread about the 186 thing - nevermind about that then. As for VMWare/Linux performance, is it expected that the Windows client performance will increase?

Anything could happen with these clients being in beta. Performance could increase, points could be adjusted, different kinds of WUs introduced?

 

[JonB]

Supposed to be a new release for PS3 and Folding released soon.