The next major step forward: Streaming Processor cores (September 2006)
Much like the Gromacs core greatly enhanced Folding@home by a 20x to 30x speed increase via a new utilization of hardware (SSE) in PC�s, in 2006, Folding@home has developed a new streaming processor core to utilize another new generation of hardware: GPU�s with programmable floating-point capability. By writing highly optimized, hand tuned code to run on ATI X1900 class GPU�s, the science of Folding@home will see another 20x to 30x speed increase over its previous software (Gromacs) for certain applications. This great speed increase is achieved by running essentially the complete molecular dynamics calculation on the GPU; while this is a challenging software development task, it appears to be the way to achieve the highest speed improvement on GPU's.
In addition, through collaboration with Pande Group, Sony has developed an analogous core for the PS3�s Cell processor (another streaming processor), which should see a significant speed increase for the science over the types of calculations we could previously do on a x86/SSE Gromacs core as well. Following what we did with the introduction of Gromacs, we will now switch benchmark machines and include an ATI X1900XT GPU in order to be able to benchmark streaming WUs (which cannot be run on non-GPU machines). This machine will also benchmark CPU units (which continue to be of value since GPUs work only for certain simulations) without using its GPU.
