Posted on Saturday, June 14 2008 @ 2:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A Folding@Home client for ATI cards has already been available for quite a while and TG Daily says a client for NVIDIA cards will finally be launched next week as part of the GT200 launch.
Owning such a card will have its benefits in Folding@Home and will outrun Radeon 3870 cards. The new GeForce cards are expected to hit more than 650ns of protein simulation in a single day, while the Radeon HD 3870 is stuck at about 170 ns. The Playstation 3 is able to produce "only" 100 ns of simulation, while a quad-core CPU creates an output of just four nanoseconds. For those who are keeping count: The GeForce GPU will be about 163 times faster than a quad-core processor in this specific application.
Nvidia founded Team “Whoopass”, which consists only of several computers that are running the Folding@Home GPU client. Even with just 4-5 test machines, the team quickly moved into the top 5% of all contributors by sheer processing power. Dr. Vijay told us that if only 1% of all CUDA-capable users would start using Folding@Home in their spare time, the Folding@Home machine would quickly be considered the fastest performing HPC computer in the whole world – hitting about 60-80 Peta FLOPS of processing power.
