Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Folding@home Passes Petaflop Mark
9/25/2007
The distributed computing project known as Folding@home (FAH) last week passed one of its long-anticipated milestones: more than a petaflop of computational power, reached Sept. 16. The group, run out of Stanford University's Department of Chemistry, placed credit for the surge beyond its 1 Pflops goal on the Playstation 3 and the latest PS3 client app, which is designed to take greater advantage of the floating point power of the PS3's Cell B.E. processor.A note posted on Folding@home's blog Tuesday ("Post petaflop") read: "We've all been very excited about the great turnout of FAH donors over the last few days, allowing FAH to go over a petaflop. The PS3s have been cranking out some very useful scientific results due to the new scientific software present in v1.2."
FAH is run by the Pande Group in Stanford University's Department of Chemistry. The project is an effort to distribute protein assembly ("folding") simulations in order to study, among other things, diseases that can result from protein misfolding, such as some cancers and Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's diseases.
Prior to last week, no distributed computing project on record had exceeded the 1 Pflops mark.
One Pflops represents 1,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1 quadrillion) floating point operations per second. The current (as of this writing) total Pflops being achieved by the project's active CPUs is 1.116, made possible by about 242,000 CPUs total. The bulk of the flops is being delivered by PS3 systems, which account for 0.853 Pflops out of the 1.116 total using roughly 34,500 PS3 CPUs--about 25 Gflops apiece. By contrast, there are about 172,000 Windows-based systems in the project resulting in a comparatively scant 0.164 Pflops. The 4,116 Intel-based Macs in the project are delivering about 0.013 Pflops total.
The next step beyond 1 Pflops, according to the group, is improving the accuracy of its models as well as bringing FAH's total computational power closer to 2 Pflops.
Read More:
About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com.
Have any additional questions? Want to share your story? Want to pass along a news tip? Contact Dave Nagel, executive editor, at dnagel@1105media.com.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
