Sunday, March 25, 2007
Team Creation for Folding@Home and Ideas for Creation@Home
I just downloaded the Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. It is very cool. For those of you who aren't aware, the Playstation 3 uses IBM's new Cell processor, which has 9 cores - a main processor called the PPE (basically a stripped down PowerPC core) and 8 "synergistic" processors called SPEs (kind of glorified altivecs - SIMD units capable of little else - the PS3 actually only has access to 7 of them). The SPEs each run at 3.2 Gigahertz and can each issue a 4-element SIMD floating-point operation each clock cycle, which can also be overlapped with certain other computations. Each Cell processor is worth about 10 normal processors when doing single-precision floating point operations. Anyway, this means that Folding@Home runs lightning fast on them.
Anyway, the Folding@Home client made it into the PS3's Online Network main menu. I downloaded it, and started team creation. If anyone else wants to boost the Creationist contribution to Folding@Home, download the Folding@Home client, and configure it to be on team 59478.
So this got me thinking... wouldn't it be cool to have something like Creation@Home? So that Creation researchers who want access to clustered machines for numerical calculations could simply use the home computing power of Creationists running Creation@Home. Now, this actually has a whole slew of different technical issues than something like Folding@Home. F@H is based on a small set of special-purpose algorithms. However, something general like Creation@Home would require that any arbitrarily-constructed algorithm be runnable on the systems. This might mean that different researchers might have different libraries they need to load, which means that the Creation@Home client would need fuller access to the system. In addition, to get the full benefit of the different platforms (like the PS3), the algorithms would have to be compiled for each platform on the network, and, in the case of the PS3, it would have to be not only re-compiled, but re-written. Also, it would likely be that we would need everyone running the same operating system (like Linux). However, running Linux on the PS3, while doable, is not something that people who have a PS3 for gaming would be willing or able to do.
Anyway, there is a lot of stuff to consider, and the architecture might be something like that of Planet Lab (a description of the architecture is available in this talk (the PlanetLab software is apparently available here).
Anyway, I'm curious to hear from my readers -- who here would run Creation@Home if it were created? How many have a PS3 that they would consider installing something like Creation@Home? Is there anyone here with a numerical simulation they would like to run on Creation@Home?
In any case, if you have a computer (especially a Playstation 3) that sits idle a lot, consider downloading Folding@Home and sign up for "team creation", team 59478.
Anyway, the Folding@Home client made it into the PS3's Online Network main menu. I downloaded it, and started team creation. If anyone else wants to boost the Creationist contribution to Folding@Home, download the Folding@Home client, and configure it to be on team 59478.
So this got me thinking... wouldn't it be cool to have something like Creation@Home? So that Creation researchers who want access to clustered machines for numerical calculations could simply use the home computing power of Creationists running Creation@Home. Now, this actually has a whole slew of different technical issues than something like Folding@Home. F@H is based on a small set of special-purpose algorithms. However, something general like Creation@Home would require that any arbitrarily-constructed algorithm be runnable on the systems. This might mean that different researchers might have different libraries they need to load, which means that the Creation@Home client would need fuller access to the system. In addition, to get the full benefit of the different platforms (like the PS3), the algorithms would have to be compiled for each platform on the network, and, in the case of the PS3, it would have to be not only re-compiled, but re-written. Also, it would likely be that we would need everyone running the same operating system (like Linux). However, running Linux on the PS3, while doable, is not something that people who have a PS3 for gaming would be willing or able to do.
Anyway, there is a lot of stuff to consider, and the architecture might be something like that of Planet Lab (a description of the architecture is available in this talk (the PlanetLab software is apparently available here).
Anyway, I'm curious to hear from my readers -- who here would run Creation@Home if it were created? How many have a PS3 that they would consider installing something like Creation@Home? Is there anyone here with a numerical simulation they would like to run on Creation@Home?
In any case, if you have a computer (especially a Playstation 3) that sits idle a lot, consider downloading Folding@Home and sign up for "team creation", team 59478.
Permanent Link posted by crevo @ 4:35 AM 
