GPU Computing Delivers Over a Petaflop to put NVIDIA in Top Spot in Distributed Computing Application
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA GPUs are
contributing over 1 petaflop[1] of processing power to Stanford University's
Folding@home distributed computing application as of last week, according to
the statistics published by Stanford. Active NVIDIA(R) GPUs deliver over 1.25
petaflops, or 42% of the total processing power of the application which seeks
to understand how proteins affect the human body.
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NVIDIA's petaflop contribution, nearly half of the processing power on
Folding@home, is delivered by just 11,370 of the total active processors used
in the project. In comparison, 208,268 CPUs running Windows were active,
contributing just 198 teraflops -- just 6% of the total processing power in
the project.
Stanford University released a Folding@home client specifically for NVIDIA
GPUs in June, so this staggering advance has been achieved in only a few
months. Developed using NVIDIA CUDA(TM), a C language programming environment
for many-core parallel architectures, the CUDA port of the Folding@home client
has delivered more processing power than any other architecture in the history
of the project.
'As these statistics show, the impact of NVIDIA GPUs on protein folding
simulations has been extraordinary,' said Vijay Pande, associate professor of
chemistry, Stanford University and director of the Folding@home project.
'Teams that are folding with NVIDIA GPUs are seeing huge boosts to their
production and this is helping to accelerate the project significantly.'
'Applications like Folding@home are just the beginning, every day we are
seeing more and more examples of computing problems that are benefitting from
CUDA and our GPU technologies,' said Michael Steele, general manager of visual
consumer solutions at NVIDIA. 'I know everyone at NVIDIA has been closely
tracking the progress of the Folding@home project since the release of the
CUDA port for our GPUs and we are delighted to see them making such a
significant and meaningful contribution to what is extremely valuable work.'
Stanford University's distributed computing program Folding@home has
become a major force in researching cures to life-threatening diseases such as
cancer, cystic fibrosis, and Parkinson's disease by combining the computing
horsepower of millions of processors to simulate protein folding.
