Thread: Domination!

These are the latest stats from the Folding@Home project.
PS3 users have just been able to add their processing power, and let's remember folks, there's about 100 times as many computers contributing as PS3s. [If you aren't donating clock cycles to this or another like minded project, do a favor and punch yourself in your genitals]

Take a look at those TFLOPS. That's PS3 machines delivering over 251 trillion floating point operations per second, 100 trillion more than ten times the number of active PC CPUs, and the number is growing every time I refresh the stats page. Say what you will of the PS3 as a game machine, but this is pretty spectacular to see. Warms the cockles something fierce, and I do so love warm cockles. Michael Fahey

I heard about them trying to help cure diseases or something along those lines. All I can say is...

Aye, Folding@Home is basically deciphering proteins [Effectively the most complex nanomachine structures we know of] to help cure diseases that ocur due to incorrectly folded proteins – Cancer, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow, Parkinson's, and so on.

Most assuredly a project worth the extra dollar or two to your electric bill. [Unless your in a uni, in which case install it on every comp in sight]

Originally Posted by Ishman

Aye, Folding@Home is basically deciphering proteins [Effectively the most complex nanomachine structures we know of] to help cure diseases that ocur due to incorrectly folded proteins – Cancer, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow, Parkinson's, and so on.

Most assuredly a project worth the extra dollar or two to your electric bill. [Unless your in a uni, in which case install it on every comp in sight]

Ummm, Ish, I don't think there is much of a link between prions(incorrectly folded proteins) and cancer, personally, that is like comparing Volkswagon Beetles(the old kind) and 19th century military bugles. Nor does Parkinson's disease have anything to do with prions, as far as I know...

^ He didn't name prions, he just mentioned mad cow...there are plenty of other ways for proteins to be messed up.

Besides, they're not so much incorrectly folded, as folded in a manner that allows them to self-replicated at the expense of it's host's health, it's probably the only life form that spawns directly (and presumably spontaneously) from another (if you choose to define them as being living).

And even then, those are just the prions that interact with certain animals, there are some that live naturally as a part of fungi if I recall correctly.


on topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraflo..._game_consoles

It's apparently because of the GPUs...not sure how that works...

What I said months ago still stands firm:
The Cell Broadband Engine is good for number crunching due to its asymmetric design that's flawed for multi-purpose processing.
And I will restate this: The Cell would be a AI processor in a game of chess. The branching of such calculations fits its design.
Also this:
Take a look at some of the bigger teams. The processors they are using are all either mostly Netburst-based or old machines that they spare for F@H.
Moreover, they still haven't made the x86 client take advantage of SSE3, let alone the newer instruction sets. If you want to read up on stream processors and what NVIDIA and ATI have in reserve with their GPU-based computing (like CUDA), the Cell BE is mediocre compared to processors dedicated to such tasks. Why? The SPEs are nothing more than stream processors when compared to the PPE. Eight stream processors is not impressive, especially when the 8800GTX has 128 of them and the dual-threaded 64 stream processors of the X2900XTX.
As for its use in a console unit, its architecture is a hindrance more than a good thing. You might have heard of Valve's use of multi-core processing in the newer builds of the Source engine - Asymmetric processing does not have its place in general computing yet. On one hand, you have the aggressively powerful architectures from Intel (Nehalem, the successor to Core), AMD (K8L and K10) and IBM (Power6) with even shorter pipelines and far lower memory latencies and on the other hand, more versatile asymmetric processors like GPUs.

...
Cancer not dealing with prions?

Half of all known cancers involve some mutation in p53, the so-called guardian of the cell. P53 is a tumor suppressor which signals for cell death if their DNA gets damaged. If these cells didn't die, their damaged DNA would lead to the strange and unusual growths found in cancer tumors and this growth would continue unchecked, until death. When p53 breaks down and does not fold correctly (or even perhaps if it doesn't fold quickly enough), then DNA damage goes unchecked and one can get cancer. We have been studying specific domains of p53 in order to predict mutations relevant in cancer and to study known cancer related mutants.

^ I though prions were defined as being transmittable and self-replicating?

I seemed to recall that they're defined that way, and wiki seems to back it up.

If it's cancer than it's just a misshapen protein, it doesn't actually spread itself, the cancerous cells just don't undergo apoptosis and grow out of control, while making more of the protein due to the damaged DNA it carries.

Hooray! The sooner they find a cure for cancer the better. Both my parents had it so that probably increases my chances to get it by a lot...

Better go install it.

While that's true Jyuu, it's a bit irrelevant. I don't see petabytes of data being contributed by GPUs, and that's because they aren't currently robust enough to do anything besides graphics processing, are they?

It doesn't really matter how flawed or crappy the architecture is, when it gets things done. With only a hundred thousand or so PS3s, they're doing the workload of many times they're weight in PCs. Alot of em may be dated, but they're still supposed to be better than a "Shitty game console".