BinaryMage
New Member
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2011
- Messages
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System Name | Igne Mortis |
---|---|
Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 |
Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P |
Cooling | Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro LGA775 |
Memory | 4GB OCZ Platinum DDR2 1066 |
Video Card(s) | ASUS HD4850 TOP |
Storage | Seagate 500GB |
Display(s) | Dual 1280x1024 |
Audio Device(s) | Integrated |
Power Supply | Antec NeoPower 550 |
Announced last September, WCG is planning to release a GPU application, initially for the Help Conquer Cancer project.
Quote from forums:
Timing-wise (thank you KieX) a beta period is slated to start sometime in January 2012. (If you want to participate, you'll need to opt-in on the WCG website)
If this goes through as planned, our whole crunching strategy will likely change. GPUs are far, far more efficient than CPUs, FLOPS-wise. (Floating Point Operations per Second) For example, an overclocked i7 2600k, costing about $310, puts out about 14 GFLOPS. (reference) A videocard at the same price point, the HD 6970, puts out 2700 GFLOPS - 192 times what the i7 does. Now, GFLOPS do not directly translate into BOINC crunching power - but they are related. An i7 puts out maybe 5,000 PPD on an average BOINC project. The 6970 will do 250,000 PPD - a 50-fold increase. (source) Now, these GPU credit numbers are not from WCG, and the actual numbers from WCG GPU crunching will probably differ slightly. But nonetheless, crunching with a videocard instead of a CPU will likely be more efficient by many orders of magnitude. The official supported list of cards is here, but any AMD card supporting OpenCL or nVidia card supporting CUDA should work.
Now, many of you are probably frustrated right now. Your 2600k you just bought for crunching - you now think was maybe not the best investment. I like to think of it like this. We crunch to help people. Not to win contests. Not to accumulate points. Your i7 isn't going to do any less work. It's not going to help people any less. But hopefully using videocards in the future will allow us to help people more. If the GPU application is, say, 40 times more efficient than the CPU one (in tasks finished/day at a certain price point), then that means, if we switch to buying GPUs instead, the project can obtain hopefully useful data much, much faster than it could otherwise. More efficient ways to help people? Sounds good to me, and that's the bottom line.
Quote from forums:
Hello WCGrid members,
The September 2011 update to the Help Conquer Cancer project has been posted. In this update, we announce work presented earlier this year at the High-Performance Computing Symposium in Montreal: the development of an OpenCL (GPU) implementation of HCC. This GPU version is currently running in our lab. We are pleased with its performance, and anticipate its eventual launch on the World Community Grid.
Please be patient in the meantime. It will take time. A large-scale launch on a new hardware platform is tricky business for the World Community Grid staff, especially while juggling every other active project and new projects emerging from the pipeline.
Thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and interest in HCC, and your contribution of CPU cycles that make this and other projects possible.
Christian A. Cumbaa
Research Associate, Ontario Cancer Institute
University Health Network
Timing-wise (thank you KieX) a beta period is slated to start sometime in January 2012. (If you want to participate, you'll need to opt-in on the WCG website)
If this goes through as planned, our whole crunching strategy will likely change. GPUs are far, far more efficient than CPUs, FLOPS-wise. (Floating Point Operations per Second) For example, an overclocked i7 2600k, costing about $310, puts out about 14 GFLOPS. (reference) A videocard at the same price point, the HD 6970, puts out 2700 GFLOPS - 192 times what the i7 does. Now, GFLOPS do not directly translate into BOINC crunching power - but they are related. An i7 puts out maybe 5,000 PPD on an average BOINC project. The 6970 will do 250,000 PPD - a 50-fold increase. (source) Now, these GPU credit numbers are not from WCG, and the actual numbers from WCG GPU crunching will probably differ slightly. But nonetheless, crunching with a videocard instead of a CPU will likely be more efficient by many orders of magnitude. The official supported list of cards is here, but any AMD card supporting OpenCL or nVidia card supporting CUDA should work.
Now, many of you are probably frustrated right now. Your 2600k you just bought for crunching - you now think was maybe not the best investment. I like to think of it like this. We crunch to help people. Not to win contests. Not to accumulate points. Your i7 isn't going to do any less work. It's not going to help people any less. But hopefully using videocards in the future will allow us to help people more. If the GPU application is, say, 40 times more efficient than the CPU one (in tasks finished/day at a certain price point), then that means, if we switch to buying GPUs instead, the project can obtain hopefully useful data much, much faster than it could otherwise. More efficient ways to help people? Sounds good to me, and that's the bottom line.
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