[Info-vax] BOINC for VMS

[Neil Rieck]

On Sunday, March 11, 2012 6:32:54 AM UTC-4, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> Hans Vlems schrieb:
> 
> > I agree that SETI and BOINC can do a lot for marketing, especially
> > when hobbyist systems can compete too.
> > But we know what happened to Alpha. Even if VMS was ported to Intel's
> > x64 platform I and given proper FP support I wouldn't try to join
> > BOINC.
> 
> Yep. I wonder if it really makes sense even on x86
> (apart from being a funny hobby, of course).
> The numbers one can find in the net (500k PCs, 5 Petaflops)
> aren't really impressive when compared with today's supercomputers,
> each of which has approx this performance level.
> These beasts, when dedicated to stuff like protein folding,
> are more economical and certainly more ecological than a bunch
> of commodity PCs.
> Today, Watts per megaflop is at least as important as purchase
> price of hardware.

I think it depends on the setup. For example, we all know that a clever programmer could play a tune with a CPU, but a special purpose device, like a sound card, is so much more efficient. Likewise, anyone who has ever attempted signal analysis with a CPU knows DSP/FFT is possible, it's just that it is much easier to do it on a CPU with MMX/SSE instructions. (SIMD technology would never have been allowed on a true RISC chip like the Alpha).

But a graphics card like ATI's HD5870 is really a special purpose piece of hardware with 1600 streaming processors along with its own dedicated memory which is usually larger than the host platform.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_at_home.html#ATI

It is in these situations that commodity PCs really shine when doing distributed science.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/