A new Folding@Home client was announced for the PS3. This client integrates and uses the various cell processor cores and the ATI RSX GPU for what appears to be a very high performance client.
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html
This is quite spectacular if it works as described (and doesn't dramatically shorten the PS3's life).

I wonder how good a fit a Rosetta based client would be on the PS3. First would need BOINC to run on the PS3. Then I wonder if the performance would be worth it as I think Rosetta likes FPU performance primarily?

Really cool stuff. We can use these PS3 on chrunching farmes :-)

They also have announced that it's running on their ATI GPU cluster X1900 (or is that AMD X1900's ;-) or better probably needed, no luck for Nvidia folk.

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Team mauisun.org

That would be INSANE... 100 gigaflops per computer?! That boggles my mind since an overclocked Core 2 Duo cruncher is around 3.2 gigaflops/second.

PS3 would be the premeire crunching machine if it is true! Maybe I'll hold off on that purchase :)

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Sony isn't going to enjoy that very much - they take about $250 loss on every console sold and want to make it up with games... not going to happen if it's used for research.

On the other hand they may be able to make a stripped down version without a BluRay player that'd make it considerably cheaper.

I have my PS3 pre-ordered already and will definatly sign up for this when I get it. Would prefere to crunch Rosetta on the PS3 too, but from a recent thread it doesn't look like they're going to make an application for it. :(

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How likely would it be that Rosetta can work on a PS3?

If you build it, they will come, with or without Sony pushing it. Got to hand it to F@H, this is a big and very cool step for distributed computing. The Cell processor took ~$400 million to research and develop between Sony/IBM/Toshiba, it might as well get used for something useful =)

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In 2008 or sooner AMD processors will have GPU floating point calculations done on the CPU. (That's why they bought ATI. Intel will do it also, but they don't need to buy nVIDIA.) Existing projects that are floating point computation intensive will benefit without having to develop software to utilize the extra FPU capabilities of current style video cards' GPUs.

@Soriak,

It was Sony that was demonstrating it.



@thread

BOINC has the intent (or at least Rom Walton does) to get BOINC proted to XBOX360, PS3 and Wii.

I believe XBOX360 would probably be first though since Microsoft back and are working in some of teh projects development, Gates Foundation donates lots of money to them (project such os Rosetta@home). The platform for development is available.

Read here (Roms Blog)

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Team mauisun.org

Great find FluffyChicken!
Hopefully it will become a reality.
And I wonder about the use of graphics cards to help the calculations (folding@home is putting this in open beta testing next month but only for high end ATI cards) - apparently a X1900XT will give a significant boost in performance (details on just how much is not yet posted, but likely to be over 3x improvement).

Great find FluffyChicken!
Hopefully it will become a reality.
And I wonder about the use of graphics cards to help the calculations (folding@home is putting this in open beta testing next month but only for high end ATI cards) - apparently a X1900XT will give a significant boost in performance (details on just how much is not yet posted, but likely to be over 3x improvement).

Folding@Home mention it 20 to 40 times for certain aspects of the coed (well that's what the HPF FAQ's say).

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Team mauisun.org

In Boinc Dev mail list topic similar to this one, Dr. Anderson Posted the following:

David Anderson to Tigher, boinc_dev
More options 12:53 pm (5 hours ago)

I asked MS for help porting BOINC to Xbox about a year ago.
They said no.
I asked them again 2 days ago, after the F@h/playstation story came out.
They said they'd think about it.

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With the overheating problems the initial Xbox360s were reported to having, I'm not surprised MS said no. Hopefully with the latest revision this problem is history so they would be open to running BOINC on it. (The original xboxs where x86 based and had a hack to put linux on it so they did run folding@home among other things - but as they were using a fairly weak CPU (IIRC Celeron/PIII 733MHz hybrid) it wasn't fast).
What is interesting with Sony is that there was also reports that it also overheated and that the clock speed was dropped to correct that. I guess they dropped it enough that it gave them enough margin that they are no longer concerned about overheating.

If the PS3 performs that well on F@H, it doesn't take that long to pop the case open, remove and upgrade the cpu cooling and add extra 120mm fan or two. A couple of those would replace quite the pharm - and free up computers to run other worthy projects

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If the PS3 would be this good with F@H or R@H, then you can retire the farm and save LOTS on the electricity bill.

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If the PS3 would be this good with F@H or R@H, then you can retire the farm and save LOTS on the electricity bill.

but that farms gives you that little extra over the pure PS3ers ;-)

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Team mauisun.org