[gmx-users] Folding at Home on PS3 == Gromacs on PS3?

[Erik Lindahl]

Hi,

The Pande group will indeed be using Gromacs in F at H on the PS3, but  
at least initially it will be not be an accelerated version that  
makes good use of all the 8 SPE processors, but rather compiled. To  
them it's still useful due to the sheer number of machines they can  
get access to.

However, we _are_ working on real Cell optimizations, but that's much  
harder. In contrast to SSE/Altivec/ia64 assembly it is not just a  
matter of instructions, but we need to come up with an entirely new  
way of handling the data, and programming direct memory access on the  
SPEs.

Similar stuff is going in with graphics cards. Right now the  
neighborlists is the main obstacle, but we have good hopes this might  
improve in the next generation of GPUs.

So, we're not keeping things secret, it's just that this type of  
hardware isn't particularly useful compared to clusters yet ;-)

Cheers,

Erik





On Aug 24, 2006, at 9:38 PM, David Mobley wrote:

> Sabuj,
>
> I suggest asking the Pande group directly. As far as I know they are
> mostly not checking the list that regularly.
>
> Are you sure that it is F at H on the PS3? I had thought they just ported
> GROMACS there.
>
> David
>
> On 8/24/06, Sabuj Pattanayek <sabuj.pattanayek at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I haven't used Folding at Home but I've heard that it uses Gromacs as  
>> its
>> engine. So this probably means that someone has already ported it for
>> the Cell proc. Any plans to eventually make this port available  
>> for d/l?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sabuj Pattanayek
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