New Folding@home GPU Client Available

[Disparia]

Anyone setting up a serious folding machine, or a bunch of them could potentially just grab two quad-core Xeons (the Xeons Fold faster, as they're optimised more for server duties, and FP operations AFAIK), and stick that in a motherboard with like two PCIe slots, stick about 8-16Gigs of RAM, and two HD3k series cards, and have a seriously powerful Folding rig. AMD wouldn't sell their processors for this, but they'd make money off their GPU sales at least.

Does the GPU client have a max instances like the CPU client (16)? The GPU FAQ wasn't too clear on that.

Could get a dual Xeon single-board computer and 19 3850/3870

Probably only get to run one CPU SMP client and leave the other Xeon to handle all the clients.

 

[Steevo]

One core per client per GPU core. I am using one of my cores and my HD3870 @ 860 core 1206 Mem and finished 3 1/2 units last night. Would ahve done more but Perfect Disk perfectly fucked up my filesystem and I had to do a repair and much else. Kept getting Unmountable_boot_volume errors, it would load windows and as soon as the control was handed over to windows drivers it took a dump on me. But anyway, I still had my slipstream disk from my last install handy, so a hour later and I was going.

 

[Steevo]

ATI was supported on the X1K series due to lazy ass workarounds in the 7K and 8K series from Nvidia to gain better performance. 24bit instead of true 32bit precision. Plus they were unwilling to work with anyone on driver interfacing or anything else. Plus it is the Stream Processors that are programmable that make this project go for ATI.

 

[TheGuruStud]

I think the environmental aspect of this is quite interesting. For human health were killing the earth, kind of ironic. The powers got to come from somewhere. I guess I'm one of those idiots who still turns off my computer when I'm not using it.

You mean you quit using your comp? Sound like a noob, to me

 

[TheGuruStud]

One core per client per GPU core. I am using one of my cores and my HD3870 @ 860 core 1206 Mem and finished 3 1/2 units last night. Would ahve done more but Perfect Disk perfectly fucked up my filesystem and I had to do a repair and much else. Kept getting Unmountable_boot_volume errors, it would load windows and as soon as the control was handed over to windows drivers it took a dump on me. But anyway, I still had my slipstream disk from my last install handy, so a hour later and I was going.

It corrupted your boot sector (or windows did b/c windows likes to do that). All that is needed is to run Partition Table Doctor. It will repair the boot and partitions. It's a 15 sec job.

 

[hat]

Still no Nvidia support?
What makes ATi so much better at GPU folding than Nvidia that they don't make an Nvidia client?

 

[Steevo]

It corrupted your boot sector (or windows did b/c windows likes to do that). All that is needed is to run Partition Table Doctor. It will repair the boot and partitions. It's a 15 sec job.

No. The file system was Fubar, I had and still have a custom boot sector. All my files and data were OK, but the journals and other pointers were not updated by PD correctly and caused corruption.