http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34783First was Vijay Pande of Stanford University, one of the people behind Folding@Home. Running Folding@Home on a GPU, specifically an X1900 class card. It is seeing between a 20-40 times speedup depending - not least how fast a CPU can feed the card. This would mean a GPU can do what most of a rack of servers can.
Modern GPUs such as the R580 core powering ATI's X19xx series have upwards of 48 pixel shading units, designed to do exactly what the Folding@Home team requires. With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU. Once we have the client in our hands, we'll put this to the test, but even a fraction of this number would represent a massive speedup.
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The situation for NVIDIA users however isn't as rosy, as while the research group would like to expand this to use the latest GeForce cards, their current attempts at implementing GPU-accelerated processing on those cards has shown that NVIDIA's cards are too slow compared to ATI's to be used. Whether this is due to a subtle architectural difference between the two, or if it's a result of ATI's greater emphasis on pixel shading with this generation of cards as compared to NVIDIA we're not sure, but Folding@Home won't be coming to NVIDIA cards as long as the research group can't solve the performance problem.
A new client released today supports ATI's X1900 and X1950 graphics cards, which can unleash about 375 GFlops, which is about 20 to 40 times more speed than what the project has seen so far. The group has also improved the software algorithm of Folding@Home, which he expects will bring another 10 - 15x improvement for a total maximum performance increase of about 500x - when ATI's graphics cards are used.
Já tenho o cliente, não consigo arranjar as drivers, com as Cat 6.9 não funciona.
? :|Já estão online os drivers necessários ao cliente GPU do Folding@Home.
Podem fazer o download aqui: Download Catalyst Beta 6.10
FAQ ATI GPU. Download and install the necessary system software. Due to the complex nature of performing scientific calculations on GPUs, the FAH GPU client needs very specific system software to work. We think that this is a big nuisance, and we are working on a way to avoid this in the future, but for now, there is no way around this (please keep in mind that a Graphics Driver is really a compiler or sorts and thus any GPU code is very sensitive to this issue). Please backup your computer's hard drive (always a good idea in these situations) and then install the following components:
- Catalyst driver version 6.5 [download from ATI or from a Stanford mirror ] or version 6.10 [download from ATI ], but not any other versions: 6.6 and 6.7 will work, but at a major performance hit; 6.8 and 6.9 will not work at all. Due to all the complexities of support, we will support only versions 6.5 and 6.10.
- DirectX: 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) or later, [download here] , which yields d3dx9_30.dll (the critical part for FAH)
O link não me estava a funcionar, mas ja as arranjei
Só instalar e ja vou testar
E a velocidade dele?
Atenção que isso é o limite que eles dão (ou seja, é pouco provavel que seja atingível), além disso, de certeza que varia muito de WU para WU, e também deve variar com o tempo...Onde raio foram eles buscar os 40x mais rapido?