We recently reported about Cure@PS3 which is a project to optimize Folding@Home for Sony’s powerful video game console PlayStation 3. The consoel sports hardware, read Cell, that is very well suited for the workload which folding means and now the FAH (Folding@Home) group at Stanford has also released more information about the work it is putting into getting ATI’s graphics circuits to handle folding. Ever since ATI launched R520 has been boasting the architecture’s possibilities to be used for other things than just 3D rendering. The Stanford university has for long been working with ATI’s circuits to make them work with FAH and has now updated the information about its project.
It also claims that ATI’s GPUs will be able to offer a performance of up to 100 gigaflop, the same as Sony PS3. This would open up whole new possibilities for computers to work with FAH and according to Stanford it is just 4-5 weeks away from the first open beta version for ATI’s graphics circuits. In its official FAQ the Stanford university says it is concentrating on ATI’s GPUs since they’ve proven to be considerably more efficient with FAH executions. Apparently, there have have been made some great improvements when going from the R520 to the R580 architecture which means that the number of shader processors really matters.
“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.”
It seems Folding@Home is really heading for a bright future where the performance of the processor isn’t as crucial anymore.
