Folding@Home demoed new GUI and GPU clients at the Supercomputing 2007 event!!
Here’s the major news about these new clients:
- A new GUI for the GPU and non-GPU clients. Right now, the GUI is coded for Windows, but we will be migrating it to OSX as well. The main highlights is the new look (check out the screen shot below), new updating scheme (we will update the picture in real time, or close to real time, in the GUI client, much like the GPU and PS3 clients do today), and perhaps most importantly, much better driver support (we’ve fixed most if not all of the bugs leading to driver incompatibilities). The upshot is that this is a major rewrite of much of the GUI leading to better performance, stability, and much prettier look. Thanks to Chris Sweet and ATI for their extra help here and Adam for making it all work.
- With the help of ATI, Adam and Mark have scrubbed our GPU code very hard and using what we’ve learned so far, we have a next generation GPU core which should be faster, easier to install, and has much more accurate science (at first, comparable to the PS3, but hopefully soon, something even more accurate than the current PS3 client).
- The new GPU client should be MUCH easier to install than previous versions. More on this as we go along, but ATI could make a huge difference here too.
Even tho they do not have an ETA as to when these new clients will be out, but Dr. Vijay does promised they are working hard to push it out of the door ASAP! In the meantime, check out the nice screen shot!
And I guess some of the questions regarding these new clients are…. Will the new GUI/graphic still be much slower than a CLI client with the new code? And will the new GUI client ever support SMP too?? Guess the GPU client will most likely get a point boost with the new client huh??
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I was looking for ubiquitin protein articles and found your site. I used to run folding@home on my work computer.
slightly unrelated, you may like the ubiquitin webinar that science magazine is putting on: The Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway
There is a discussion presently going on regarding a comparison of FPGA, GPU and the Cell/B.E processors for the purpose of computational computing. See here: http://www.simbiosys.ca/blog/2008/05/03/the-fast-and-the-furious-compare-cellbe-gpu-and-fpga/
I am interested in your opinions on GPU versus Cell processor.