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ATI Processors to Power Research
Techtree News Staff, Oct 09, 2006 1426 hrs ISTATI Technologies recently announced that Stanford University has released software to utilize ATI's processors for its Folding@home Research Program.
ATI Technologies recently announced that Stanford University has released software to utilize its processors for the university's Folding@home Distributed Computing Project that promises an enormous increase in the speed of disease research.
Stanford University's Folding@home program studies the ways in which proteins fold, assembling themselves in order to carry out important functions in the body. Any discrepancy in the folding function leads to various diseases. In order to better understand this, the Folding@home program groups thousands of home computers world-wide, studying folding by taking advantage of each computer s processing power to form a distributed supercomputer.
The Folding@home participants are now utilizing powerful processing architectures found in ATI Radeon X1900 and Radeon X1950 graphics cards. The Stanford university expects to gain new capabilities through this, allowing researchers to address questions that were previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.
The researchers too, are of the view that this new processing power will help them discover even more about the science of protein folding and folding-related diseases, with potentially dramatic effect for studies into Alzheimer's, Cancer, Huntington's, and Parkinson's diseases among others.
The Radeon X1900 card performs scientific calculations at around 20x to 40x, the speed of traditional computer processors. So, using the Radeon X1900 results in completion of a three years' worth research in just one month. Besides, the processing power of around 5,000 ATI processors is enough to rival the existing 200,000 computers currently involved in the Folding@home project.
It is estimated that if just 10,000 computers were to each use an ATI processor to conduct folding research, the Folding@home program would effectively perform faster than the fastest supercomputer in existence today.
In 2003, Stanford had introduced the Gromacs software core, which remains the fastest and one of the most optimized molecular dynamics codes in the world. It was tuned to take advantage of ATI's Radeon X1900 and Radeon X1950 products, delivering massive speed-up in processing.
To get involved in the Folding@home program, and take advantage of the accelerated research capabilities of ATI processors, a Radeon X1900 GT, Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition, Radeon X1950 XTX, or Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition is necessary, along with the new Folding@home (graphics processing unit) GPU client, and the ATI Catalyst 6.10 driver.
Stanford University's Folding@home program studies the ways in which proteins fold, assembling themselves in order to carry out important functions in the body. Any discrepancy in the folding function leads to various diseases. In order to better understand this, the Folding@home program groups thousands of home computers world-wide, studying folding by taking advantage of each computer s processing power to form a distributed supercomputer.
The Folding@home participants are now utilizing powerful processing architectures found in ATI Radeon X1900 and Radeon X1950 graphics cards. The Stanford university expects to gain new capabilities through this, allowing researchers to address questions that were previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.
The researchers too, are of the view that this new processing power will help them discover even more about the science of protein folding and folding-related diseases, with potentially dramatic effect for studies into Alzheimer's, Cancer, Huntington's, and Parkinson's diseases among others.
The Radeon X1900 card performs scientific calculations at around 20x to 40x, the speed of traditional computer processors. So, using the Radeon X1900 results in completion of a three years' worth research in just one month. Besides, the processing power of around 5,000 ATI processors is enough to rival the existing 200,000 computers currently involved in the Folding@home project.
It is estimated that if just 10,000 computers were to each use an ATI processor to conduct folding research, the Folding@home program would effectively perform faster than the fastest supercomputer in existence today.
In 2003, Stanford had introduced the Gromacs software core, which remains the fastest and one of the most optimized molecular dynamics codes in the world. It was tuned to take advantage of ATI's Radeon X1900 and Radeon X1950 products, delivering massive speed-up in processing.
To get involved in the Folding@home program, and take advantage of the accelerated research capabilities of ATI processors, a Radeon X1900 GT, Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition, Radeon X1950 XTX, or Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition is necessary, along with the new Folding@home (graphics processing unit) GPU client, and the ATI Catalyst 6.10 driver.
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