We are pleased to announce a DriverHeaven Folding@Home contest!!

If you join the ATI Folding@Home team (be sure to include the initials DH in your name) you could win a Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card. On December 1st, ATI will pick one lucky winner (as long as you have the DH initials in your name) Remember if you don’t have a Radeon X1900 or X1950 series of product you can still join the ATI team with the CPU version of the Folding@home client. The Winner will be announced on Driver Heaven. Please use a name when you fold the SAME as your DH forum name. For example if you are called "PETER" on Driver Heaven forums, use a folding name such as DH_Peter.

In case you haven’t heard of Folding@Home:

As many of you may have seen, ATI recently introduced stream computing to the world (using the power of the graphics processor for something other than rendering 3D graphics).

The first major initiative of stream computing was a project with Stanford University called Folding@Home. Folding@Home uses the concept of distributed computing to use 100,000’s of PC systems to help simulate the process of folding proteins (many diseases/cancers are caused by proteins miss-folding). Stanford uses this data to try and better understand why proteins miss-fold and eventually work towards the goal of finding cures for diseases and cancers.

On October 2nd ATI released GPU customized version of the Folding@Home client that folds proteins 20-40 times faster than any modern CPU or non-ATI GPU, you can check out ATi's website for more details over here Like the CPU version of the Folding Client, the GPU client only runs when there are spare cycles available (i.e. when the CPU or GPU are sitting idle), so you don’t have to worry about the Folding client slowing down their systems when using it for work. Be sure to also check out Driver Heaven's coverage of the Stream Technology over here.

Go to the link here to download the Folding client: http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Regardless of whether you download the CPU or GPU version of the Folding@Home client – be sure to join the ATI team!! (team number 51394)

Note: you currently can’t install both clients on a system at the same time.

Discuss in our forums HERE

Thanks, and good luck!!

 

Interview with ATI's Andrew Dodd:

Driver Heaven: Why did Stanford develop a special version of their Folding@Home client for the Radeon X1900/X1950 series of products?

ATI: The Radeon X1900/X1950 series of products can be viewed as very powerful parallel processing machines – they feature 48 full precision (32-bit floating posting) pixel shader engines, which are not just limited to rendering pixels. They can be used for any generic problem that requires massive parallel processing calculations, and the process of simulating protein folding requires exactly that.

Driver Heaven: How much of a performance boost will people see when they use the Radeon GPU Folding@Home client vs. the CPU Folding@Home client?

ATI: The Radeon GPU version of the Folding@Home client (used in combination with Catalyst 6.10 and a Radeon X1900/X1950 product) is 20-40 times faster than the CPU Folding@Home client, and the score you receive for completing a GPU work unit is currently 6 times greater than CPU work unit. Another very interesting data point is Stanford’s Stat’s page found here: You’ll notice that there are a total of 678 GPUs being used for Folding with a current computing power of 27 Tera FLOPS, whereas there are 1,525,720 CPUs being used for Folding with a current computing power of 151 Tera FLOPS. This means, if there were about 1.5 million GPUs running the Folding@Home client – we’d have the computational power of about 400,000 Tera FLOPS!!!

Driver Heaven : How long have you been working with Stanford on this initiative?

ATI: We’ve been working with Stanford since the initial launch of the Radeon X1800. It has taken some time to develop the Folding@Home client, as it was our first attempt as using the GPU for something other than rendering graphics. Although development started on the Radeon X1800, once the Radeon X1900 series became available it was quite clear that it made much more sense to focus on the X1900/X1950 series as it’s architecture offered significant performance gains compared to older Radeon GPUs

Driver Heaven : Do you need a Radeon X1950 or X1900 product in order to join ATI's F@H team?

ATI: Absolutely not! Anyone with the CPU version of the Folding@Home Client can still join the ATI team – team number 51394. Of course you will get a much higher score if you use the GPU version of the client :). I just want to remind everyone that in order to run the GPU version of the Folding@Home client you need a Radeon X1950 or Radeon X1900 product, Catalyst 6.10, and Stanford’s Folding@Home GPU client. Note if you have a Radeon X1950 Pro, you must download the Catalyst 6.10 Beta (found at our Folding web page:) – The Official Catalyst 6.10 release does not include support for the Radeon X1950 Pro

Driver Heaven: Now that the GPU client has been released, what’s next for GPGPU (General Purpose GPU)?

ATI: Good question ... We’ve got a number of projects under way (we’re looking into more scientific projects, plus some other stuff I can’t mention yet) – but the next big GPGPU effort from us will be physics support; needless to say, 2007 will be a very big year for Radeon GPGPU support !