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GPU Foling?

T

Time2Kill

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 10, 2005
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I remember awhile back there was a lot of talk about GPU folding, but it has since dropped from the face of the planet. Has there been any news/advancements for GPU folding?
 
Not that I've heard. Stanfords High Preformance FAQ needs some updating.
 
It's probably not something that would be advisable. Sure gpu's are powerful, but they're not made to be at 100% stress 24/7 like your processor is.

Needless to say, it is an interesting prospect.
 
apHytHiaTe said:
It's probably not something that would be advisable. Sure gpu's are powerful, but they're not made to be at 100% stress 24/7 like your processor is.

Needless to say, it is an interesting prospect.
Click to expand...

Stanford has been slowly developing a client to do just this. They have done some testing on it and a Radeon X1800XT was blowing away a highend P4 from the looks of things. The ATI X1x00 line is made to be programmable and take on tasks other than just graphics. The graphics card doesn't do much except sit there for the most part except for times when games are played. Might as well make other uses of it when it's not gaming. The graphics card is perfect for stuff like this as it is it's own CPU and has it's own RAM. Besides, it's not going to be using every transistor to do things like folding. I'm sure there will be parts that aren't used for anything when it comes to something like folding which will decrease the stress and heat output.

 
Your graphics card can run at 100% 24/7 as long as you want--it's the itty-bitty, high-speed fan you have to worry about. Put a nice, big passive heatsink on your graphics card, and you're golden.

 
SmokeRngs said:
Stanford has been slowly developing a client to do just this. They have done some testing on it and a Radeon X1800XT was blowing away a highend P4 from the looks of things. The ATI X1x00 line is made to be programmable and take on tasks other than just graphics. The graphics card doesn't do much except sit there for the most part except for times when games are played. Might as well make other uses of it when it's not gaming. The graphics card is perfect for stuff like this as it is it's own CPU and has it's own RAM. Besides, it's not going to be using every transistor to do things like folding. I'm sure there will be parts that aren't used for anything when it comes to something like folding which will decrease the stress and heat output.

Click to expand...

are they mainly focusing on the x1800 line? what about the 6/7800?
 
Jason711 said:
are they mainly focusing on the x1800 line? what about the 6/7800?
Click to expand...

What would be even neater is the 5200 - 5900 Nvidia cards.
You can get them in standard PCI format. With 64 - 128MB of RAM. And they are cheap!
Then a Standard ATX mobo would hold like 5 cards. MINI - FARM!!!!

Don't know if Windows or Linux would like that many video cards installed though.

 
rodsfree said:
What would be even neater is the 5200 - 5900 Nvidia cards.
You can get them in standard PCI format. With 64 - 128MB of RAM. And they are cheap!
Then a Standard ATX mobo would hold like 5 cards. MINI - FARM!!!!
Click to expand...

Now thats getting warmer, but how about this, the Gigabyte Quad-Royale! :D 4 PCIE slots, for all sorts of GPU folding goodness!
 
p[H]ant0m said:
Now thats getting warmer, but how about this, the Gigabyte Quad-Royale! :D 4 PCIE slots, for all sorts of GPU folding goodness!
Click to expand...
And populate all four slots with their dual-GPU video cards! (good luck fitting four of those in with that kind of heatsink!) That's eight GPUs of folding goodness, not to mention your normal CPU!

Unfortunately, they've only done the dual-GPU video card with nVidia GPUs, which don't perform nearly as well at folding as the ATi hardware.

 
Mohonri said:
And populate all four slots with their dual-GPU video cards! (good luck fitting four of those in with that kind of heatsink!) That's eight GPUs of folding goodness, not to mention your normal CPU!

Unfortunately, they've only done the dual-GPU video card with nVidia GPUs, which don't perform nearly as well at folding as the ATi hardware.

Click to expand...


The Nvidias have got to be better than some of the crappers that we've got folding. :D




 
Jason711 said:
are they mainly focusing on the x1800 line? what about the 6/7800?
Click to expand...

I think it was the 7800 line they were focusing on with nVidia although they may have worked with the 6x00 line also. I'm not sure about that, though. What they did have for benchmarks showed the nVidia cards getting spanked bad by the X1800 line. I think this has less to do with putting more time towards one GPU or another than it does the architecture of the x1800 GPU. ATI designed it so it can be used for many other things other than graphics processing. I think one of the main things they were looking towards was if you had two of them, one could be used for graphics while the other could be used for physics calculations. Other companies would also be able to develop software that would run on it or make use of it somehow within their software.

Personally, I think it's an ingenious idea and something that has been long overdue. What better option to have in a vid card than to allow it to do things other than the normal vid card functions? Nothing like being able to offload stuff from the CPU to the vid card when the vid card isn't doing much anyway if the software can run on it.

 
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