X1900 = 2 Ps3

Pagina principal de Beyond3D escribió:ATI Radeon X1900 Folding@Home client to beta on October 2
28-Sep-2006, 17:45.56 Reporter : geo
Stanford's much anticipated Folding@Home client for ATI GPUs will be made available for public beta on Monday, October 2. This first client will support the Radeon X19xx line of GPUs, though later support for X1800 is foreseen by Stanford.

For those not familiar with Stanford's F@H program, it leverages the distributed computing model to create a virtual supercomputer many times more powerful than any owned by various governments, and uses this compute power to study the causes and potential cures for various cancers, Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease, etc. Beyond3D has encouraged users to contribute their spare compute cycles to F@H for some years.

Stanford is very excited by the potential of GPU folding to greatly extend their reach, with researcher Vijay Pande reporting an expected 20-40x performance increase over their current CPU solution, and roughly twice the performance of Sony's new Cell-based PS3 solution. Current scalability limits having been reached, Stanford needs a signficant performance bump per client to increase the scope of their research that only the inherent parallelism of GPUs can provide at this time. With only 10,000 clients using ATI's X19xx series, Stanford would reach petaflop supercomputer status ahead of many governments aspiring to the same level of raw compute power.

Pande reports that at this time only ATI's GPUs are supported, as competitor solutions are not performing well enough to justify their inclusion. Beyond3D recently sat down with Stanford's Mike Houston to discuss the geeky bits and inaugurate our new GPGPU forum.