News August 2006

Sunday 13/08/2006
Top 1000: twice as good...
I have put up a Top 1000 page which will be updated every Sunday. I have included the top rank movers and all the Folding club movers as well. Any comments or suggestions pop into the forums and post away.

 

Sunday 20/08/2006
Top 1000: twice as good updated...
The Top 1000 page has been updated with this weeks info and also includes more stats for your viewing pleasure.

 
FAHLogStats: new .NET version...
Thanks to DavidRa we have a new toy to play with, its in development atm but it is looking good already.

 
News from Stanford: FAH mentioned in new book.
8/20/2006 Network outage Sunday. There will be a mostly brief (10-30 minute) network outage today at ~10am pacific time.

Also if you missed this from last month...

Great intro to biology: Inside the cell. The NIH has put out a great book which gives an introduction to cell biology, aptly called Inside the Cell. It also features Folding@Home on p. 24. Also see their html version of the document and you can also get a hardcopy from the NIH.

 

Sunday 27/08/2006
Top 1000: twice as good updated...
The Top 1000 page has been updated with this weeks info and also includes more stats for your viewing pleasure.

 
FAHLogStats: new .NET version...
David has updated FAHLogStats once again.

There is a new build of FAHLogStats.NET on the website.

Lots of little bug fixes (including minimise to tray, I think) - better validation code.

Also has the ability to set your own names for the log file and the unit info file - so if you have 1 web server and all the files are in the same folder (for example, fahlog.txt.server1 and fahlog.txt.server2) you can specify that different filename on the source server.

All the URLs are the same as the first post. Astute viewers will notice the addition of icons to the menus and menu items for Help - there is no help implemented yet, but it's coming

 
News from Stanford: PS3 and graphics cards get in on the act.

Some exciting news that is sure to expand FAH's base of users and bring some welcome news coverage around the world.

8/23/2006 PS3 client announced today. Today in Germany, Sony demoed their Folding@Home client for the PS3. For more details, check out our PS3 FAQ. Using the Cell processor of the PS3, we should be able to do more folding than what one could do on a PC. Also, since the PS3 has a powerful GPU, the PS3 client will offer real time visualization for the first time. Check out the PS3 FAQ for some early movies of that.

The PS3 client and GPU client are together part of our new broader goals to push Folding@Home to the next stage, reaching calculations on the petaflop to 10 petaflop scale. We have some preliminary details on our Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative (FPI). We will release more details on all of this as the new software rolls out. We are beta testing the ATI GPU client software internally at the moment and will likely announce an open beta in four to five weeks (end of September).

Below is a snippet from the High Performance clients FAQ

Which GPUs will be supported? We have not made any final decisions on this issue. However, our software will likely require the very latest GPUs from ATI (especially now that the newest ATI GPUs support 32 bit floating point operations). Previous work of ours used NVIDIA GPUs as well, but we have now concentrated on ATI GPU's as they allow for significant performance increases for FAH over NVIDIA's GPU's (at least at the current generation). 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.

 

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