Dec Alpha workstation for Folding?

[Selecter]

heres the unit I'm talkin about

Wondering if this type of thing would be a good folder for the price running the linux client. Anybody have any experience with one of these? How would it stack up against a say, a P III/Xeon windows box running at the same speed ? Thanks, mostly just curious.

 

[APOLLO]

I always wanted to have one of those.The Alphas probably had the most powerful FPU clock-per-clock ever, but I have no idea how it would do in F@H. I don't think the client is optimised for the Alpha RISC CPU. If you are intending to use the machine for other things, it might be an interesting piece of hardware, but I don't think it would make a great folder. However, others may know better than I.

 

[mcryptic]

it doesn't look like stanford has a client for alphas, only x86 and PPC cpus.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/download.html

 

[deranged128[OCAU]]

I think you'll find Distributed Folding does have a client though, if you're willing to contribute the machine to medical research. From memory [H] even have a small team in that project.

 

[Selecter]

Yeah, I saw the linux client and didnt think that the damn chip would'nt be supported.

Oh well, would still be fun to play with.

 

[Ravemaster Rich]

Originally posted by Selecter
heres the unit I'm talkin about

For the price you'd be better off with a bare blade AMD Athlon board setup, which you might be able to get together for $150. Alphas have powerful FPUs, but I'm pretty sure they're not 3-4x as powerful as an Athlon XP clock for clock.

Rich :¬)