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World's largest privately funded Folding farm

F

Foxery

Golden Member
Nitteo over at the Overclock.Net forums has put together an amazing folding farm, Consisting of 51 nVidia 8800 series GPUs running in 13 MSI P6N Diamond motherboards, which have 4 PCI Express slots each. Currently hovering around 150,000 PPD with several boxes offline, this farm could put out as much as 265,000 PPD when completed.

The team's stats @EOC
Thread @Overclock.Net with photos of his farm

The previous largest farm is owned by AssMan of OverClockers Australia, crunching around 180,000 PPD. McFolden of team whoopass is slightly higher, but is funded by nVidia.
 
This is some very interesting stuff. And It all boils down to what he is doing it for. I too have had some family members that had cancer and 2 have died. So, this is an impressive individual achievement to fight a worthy cause. I really admire his desire.

Keep folding, Doc
 
His system is amazing. I'm envious.

It is actually close to my personal folding farm goal of 48 9800GTX+'s on 16 motherboards using Q9300's. I, too, have lost a few family members to cancer and I have always wanted to have a farm, however, several unexpected costs have set it back many years (and many thousands of dollars). Maybe someday I'll reach X GPU's on 16 motherboards using X-core computers in the distant future.

Is there any way we could convince him to fold for TA? 😛
 
I wonder how much electricity it uses?

I could probably heat my whole house with that when it is -40F!
 
the real difficulty in a system like that for one of us everyday joe's is not the cost to build the farm, it's the huge electricity bill. figure 51x$100, so ~ $5000 for the video cards, then what, $5000 for the rest assuming he needs badass psus, so he only spent about 10k in startup costs. trying to figure out the power costs is scary, however.

hopefully I can get my business successful enough that I could run a bunch of these 24/7 there, but I have to justify the expense to the president. I can see how that conversation could go...

bryanw1995: uh, mr pres, I think that we need to buy a few p6n diamond motherboards and a bunch of used 8800gt 512's. uh, just in case we need to render adp faster. you know, sometimes we have 10 people buying cars all at once, and, um, the, uh, computer can get bogged down. or something.

pres: bryan, have you thought about a career in govt?
 
Wow is right. And I thought it would be cool if I could get 4-5 cards folding. (Up to three consistently now, aiming for 1-2 more in the next few weeks.)

Of course, cancer doesn't run in my family, and neither does Alzheimer's or most other stuff typically associated with the elderly. Now, if they could find a way to fight heart disease & other similar problems...
 
Originally posted by: DukeN
Would it be more cost effective, and crunch more using PS3s instead?
Click to expand...

Definitely PS3s are what, 3 years old now? They never change, and still cost $400, whereas GPUs get faster every year and new ones still cost $200-300. It was only a matter of time before GPUs overpowered PS3s.

In fact, here's the list from Stanford earlier this week:

OS Type Current TFLOPS* Active CPUs
Windows ______ 199 __ 209143
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 ___ 8147
Mac OS X/Intel __ 30 ___ 9776
Linux _________ 65 ___ 38024

GPU _______ 1199 __ 10902
PS3 _______ 1170 __ 41480

On average, GPUs are crunching 4x as much data as a PS3. This includes low-end and high end cards, so it varies... but basically, the latest GPUs clearly show off that they are made of newer technology.
 
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