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Catalyst 9.3: ATI now loves Folding@Home

Theo Valich — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:32:27 +0000

Back in late October, I wrote a piece where I took some 24 cards and did a test run using couple identical work units and saw that a $49.99 GeForce 9600 GSO (now known as the GeForce GT130 inside those new Mac Pros) is beating the living daylights out of ten times more expensive 4870X2. This brought a lot of attetion and the company started to address the issue.

ATI’s poor performance in Folding@Home client was mostly due to different hardware capabilities of Radeon X1K, Hd2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series. But after couple of months of hard work on code optimization, ATI managed to crack into the big league, performance-wise.

Today we received the answer a lot of Folding enthusiasts awaited for so long… after making multi-GPU possible on Catalyst 9.2, the latest 9.3 version brings new version of ATI Stream and AMD Display Library SDKs, significantly raising the performance of F@H client.

If you fold and use an ATI card, don’t think – go and download them. If you are enjoying yourself with Windows 7 Beta (for some odd reason, version 7033 works better on my system than RC 7058 – why Microsoft, why you always have superb betas and then SNAFU the final verson?), you’ll be pleased to hear thatas of this month, Catalyst for Windows 7 are entering monthly refresh schedule.

Now, if there is one person who believes Microsoft that Windows 7 is coming out next year, wake up and start preparing for this summer. ; )

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008

Theo Valich — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:32:52 +0000

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the winner of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008. This contest surprised me with great enthusiasm by fellow members, and I cannot say how happy I am to be in position to give something back. Without further adue, the winners of inaugural Folding Challenge are:

Francisc Kurko, Romania – PALIT GeForce GTX280 graphics card, signed by Jen-Hsun Huang

Winners of 3DMarkVantage retail licenses are:

Radu Neagu, Romania

Boris Romac, Croatia

Jonathan Worrel (Furious Fandango), United States of America

Ivan Faj, Croatia

Nikola Peruncic (McPingvin), Croatia

Chad Hudson (Dragoon1101), United States of America

Nenad Miodrag (nmiodrag), Croatia

Goran Gjura (spikeygoran), Croatia

Eyvind Niklasson, Sweden

Joza Habijan, Croatia

In the end, I wish to congratulate each and every one for competing in PALIT Folding Challenge 2008. I am pleasantly surprised at the effort placed by all members of this small team. Also, bear in mind that the new giveaway is already planned, and this time I will focus on giving as much prizes as possible, with several tweaks in the contest rules. Rest assured, everything that I do will be global, so no exclusions. Everybody is welcome in the group, and as the new site starts to grow, you can be sure there are plenty more surprises. For starters, we’ll make sure that we have a dedicated place for all folders on the site, in the form of site section and forum section.

All winners need to contact me at FoldingChallenge@gmail.com with their shipping address, so that I could organize shipping of prizes.

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ATI and Folding working on F@H 1.2.1: Performance, stability updates

Theo Valich — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:00:44 +0000

Catalyst 8.12 drivers are set to debut next week, and as you probably know, this is no ordinary update. AMD GPG is bringing its STREAM middleware platform and updated libraries to every user of their GPGPU-enabled products (R520 “Fudo” chip aka Radeon 1800 and newer).

As a part of AMD STREAM, ATI will release its own video transcoder for free. Given the limitations and performance that Badaboom has, I wonder did ATI decided to do something more in “formats supported” area.

On the Folding@Home front, there are great expectations from this upcoming driver, especially if you own Radeon 4800 series product. ATI worked hard to remove the driver overhead which keeps the CPU core to 100% per GPU, and as a result, folding smaller proteins should improve by some 20%.

Looking at a bigger picture, ATI’s GPGPU engineers are working night and day on the upcoming OpenCL platform, so the future of CAL and other proprietary standards is up in the air. It is obvious that any pre-4800 hardware suffers from serious drawbacks in the architecture, but 4000 and beyond has the potential to “rock on” in the GPGPU world. Radeon 4000 series finally brought several key features that Nvidia featured from GeForce 8 and beyond, so we are going to have a heated GPGPU battle in 2009.

One thing is certain, though. As soon as Catalyst 8.12 appear (according to our sources, look for Terry “Saint Catalyst Claus” Makedon coming down the chimney around December 10th), go to game.amd.com and download the drivers. There is a myriad of improvements, and you should check out Catalyst 8.12 driver with updated Folding@Home core, currently in version 1.2.1.

You can try the 1.2.1 client right now, but expect a final version showing up around the release of Catalyst 8.12. December is going to be an exciting month for ATI’s F@H community.

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Nvidia to bring SLI support for Folding@Home

Theo Valich — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:00:01 +0000

Friends from Bjorn3D got the opportunity to interview Michael Steele, General Manager of Nvidia’s Visual Consumer Solutions group. Short explanation of Michael’s role would be Nvidia’s head for all-not-gaming-related things.

The interview was focusing on Bjorn3D’s noteworthy Folding@Home effort (the team is on track to crack into Top100), thus Michael gave some interesting thoughts, such as this one.

There are a lot of very good guides out there that will walk users through the required steps to fold with multiple GPUs like the ones on HardOCP or overclockers.co.uk, just not in SLI mode yet.
NVIDIA SLI is a great extension to parallel processing and we’re looking at methods to take advantage of it with Folding@home. Stay tuned.

As you can read for yourself, there is a lot of things that Nvidia wants to do with Folding@Home. ATI is currently working on own reshuffling, but at the end of the day, whoever makes the best GPU for protein folding, always have a higher goal in your mind.
In my own opinion, Folding@Home is purest form of “pay it forward”, because GPUs helped scientists to accelerate their research measured in human generations. Couple of months ago, I spoke to Vijay and he said that GPU’s accelerated the protein research by some 30 years. Let’s hope that ATI and Nvidia can decrease that by additional 20-30-40 years to real-time levels.
Currently, most powerful ATI and Nvidia GPUs are folding in the range of 300-600 nanoseconds/day. Achieving a second per day is something I am looking forward to. In 10 years time, we’ll hopefully be at 1 hour of protein life/day on GPUs.
Just to help you calculate, 1TFLOPS of computing power would calculate 1 milisecond of protein life PER DAY. For one second of protein life per day, we need 1PFLOPS. Thus, even PFLOPS GPUs could not calculate real-time.
Anyways, you can read the interview here, and regardless of where you are, I am inviting you to join Folding@Home project. My team number is 69864, but you’re more than welcome to join any team, or even stay outside teams. But we need your idle computing power. If you feel up to contributing a little, consider Folding@Home.

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Silver anniversary: big thanks to the first 25K

Theo Valich — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:15:02 +0000

When I launched this blog several weeks ago, my goal was to reach 25,000 readers by the end of the year. I also wanted to see Folding@Home team 69864 entering Top 1000 and overall, not too loose too much time on writing this blog, so that the completely new site could take shape sooner than later.

What happened is that today, five weeks into blog’s existence – the site was visited by 25,500 people, and shows stable growth. Folding@Home team exceeded all expectations and is now on track of ending the year firmly in Top 350, maybe even in Top 300.
Anyway, there’s no stopping now, I will continue to file 2-3 news stories on daily basis (will try to do more, but…), I wish to thank you for visits and comments (if you made any – I hope I didn’t make it difficult to comment – just type your name, e-mail and you’re all set).
Of course, if you have any feedback or suggestion, just let me know.

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UPDATED: Folding@Home Challenge 2008

Theo Valich — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:00:05 +0000

November 13, 2008 is the day I will remember for two things: Firstly, this blog clocked one month of existence and my F@H team passed the two million points mark.
In the last 30 days, this site was visited 13,150 times (at the time of writing), and showing almost exponential growth. I’ve received a lot of your suggestions and thoughts – I will do my best to improve the site, but bear in mind that this site is a side project, while “the big thing” is taking shape (and taking almost all of my time). It will take some time to get it to life, but expect exciting 2009.
Now, here comes the sweet part of this post: the only thing I wanted to do in my life is to create a positive movement, positive spirit amongst the people I work with and people who read/play the projects I worked on. Thus, with great amount of enthusiasm I am announcing the following:

PALIT Multimedia Folding@Home Challenge 2008

(Yes, I know it’s a long name, sorry ;))

I’ve set up a page on this blog that has all the details about the challenge, and I invite you to join in.
The awards are (hopefully) tempting – Palit GeForce GTX280 board signed by no other than Jen-Hsun Huang, triple-C of nVIDIA Corporation (Co-founder, Chairman, CEO) and 10 licenses of 3DMarkVantage Advanced Edition. There are no territorial limits, so you can join in from anywhere

I want to express my gratitude to David Makin from PALIT Multimedia North America, Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Corporation and Andrew Humber from nVIDIA Corporation. More details about the contest are available on the link above – or just click here.

UPDATE: No, I am not competing for the board. I was asked this in couple of e-mails, and to make matters clear I’ve updated the rules as well.

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A big thank you: 6K visitors, Top 1000 F@H Team

Theo Valich — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:00:20 +0000

The last hour of Friday, October 31st brought two milestones for this blog and myself personally: blog passed 6000 visitor mark, almost 800 came to visit the site today.
I started this blog with a goal of reaching 5000 page impressions by the end of the month, and that goal has been surpassed by a cool thousand. My goal for November is to attract 10,000 visitors in a single month, so I hope the content will be good enough and that the goal will be reached.
There are already several big stories in the pipeline for next week, so I hope I will be able to write them in time. Launching my own company is taking a lot of time and financial resources, but I hope I will be able to make it. As Jon Peddie told me a while ago, you either “make it and become an industry legend” or break and become “one of regulars”. I want to do the former, of course
There is one big surprise coming next week, but more on that when it hopefully happens.

A small blog, but a big heart from its folding members - thank you guys!

As a second big thing I can inform you that with the dying hour of October, Folding@Home team 69864 (a.k.a. The Bright Side of IT) broke into Top 1000 teams. Even though there is only 18 active members, we’re almost all GPU powered and we managed to fold more than 4100 units, averaging 40K PPD (Points Per Day). But, the story does not end here. Given the fact that my personal wish for 2008 was exceeded two months before the year ended, my next target is that this team breaks into Top 500 by the end of the year.
Again, if you want to join us, you’re very welcome.
On a personal note, I will be moving from Mountain House to San Francisco (temporarily) this weekend, so there could be lack of updates on the blog. Due to my “fiscal outlook”, it seems that I will have to spend the winter in Croatia, but who knows where I’ll end up. All I know is that I want to give you the best information out there, and hopefully the new company will do just that.

Anyways, I will do my best to have articles ready for Monday… as I have an exciting week ahead.

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Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)

Theo Valich — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:43:38 +0000

I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card.
With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of this blog, but as soon as I am able to disclose the name of the new company, you’ll be the first to know
I invite you all to join team 69864, and in near future this will be much more than just a group. As the new website develops, so will this team. So far, my goal is to enter Top 1000 by end of 2008, and we’re on good way to achieve that.
If you are interested, the site to download CPU clients is here, while the GPU clients are here. If you have Nvidia-based graphics card (compatible from GeForce 8000 and above), then download this version. I’ve tried both console and the regular version, and there isn’t much difference in performance. Of course, unless you leave the display version running.
Performance-wise, Nvidia is destroying ATI at this moment, which is something I already addressed here. Let’s hope ATI will optimize Folding performance in their upcoming drivers. We doubt this will happen before the release of next generation of Radeon hardware, but who knows.
After you install the client, the configuration is really easy. If you have higher-performing hardware, then always use the large packet option, as shown in picture below.

Initial option screen... put your name in, and the group is 69864 ;-)

If you have 256MB or more video memory, check this box

MachineID is important if you plan to run more than one client (multi-GPU setups, CPU/GPU combo etc.)

After configuration, you’re good to go. The stats page is located at KakaoStats.com – yes, Kakao means Cocoa in Croatian ;-). You can also see the official one here, but the official stats page isn’t always available, since F@H servers suffer from tremendous load.
Let’s fold together and hopefully simulate enough nanoseconds that become seconds that become minutes, hours, days, years… who knows, our CPU or GPU time might help scientists tofind cure for Alzheimer or Parkison’s disease (focus of F@H group at Stanford). We might even help ourselves in the future.

Unofficial stats over at KakaoStats.com - enjoy this one even if you don't use our group #.

Pay it forward. You’re free to ping me at theo.valich @ gmail.com for a chat or if you have any questions. Always glad to help

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