Atlas Folder - Phase 2 Build

This video documents the building of Phase 2 of Atlas Folder over the weekend of May 8th-10th. Atlas Folder is a GPU "folding farm" that donates computer time to Stanford University's Folding@Home project. Prior to this addition Atlas Folder consisted of 23 nVidia GTX295s and one PS3. This effort added a total of 32 nVidia 9800GX2 dual-GPU video cards to the machine bringing the total number of discrete GPUs to 110. These cards, formerly belonging to nitteo of team overclock.net, were jointly purchased by Jason Farque of atlasfolding.com and John Van Arnam of fold4life.com. Fold on!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Huntington's
• Disease
• HD
• GTX295
• 9800GX2
• nVidia
• GPU
• CUDA
• GPGPU
• Folding
• Folding@Home
• farm

[Lil306]

Interesting setup, why not use Teslas?

Was it purely as a money saving excercise or for more crunching power, I seem to recall reading somewhere that some of the high end cards like the GTX295 where better suited for the crunching?

What's the power consumption like between the Tesla and GTX295, which draws more?

I'm running WCG and Enigma / SETI@Home atm, I'll probably delve into others but the Cancer ones are personal to me

[AtlasFolder]

@Lil306 I get this question fairly frequently. Teslas aren't any *faster* than the commercial cards. Teslas' biggest advantage is that they offer a lot more memory and double-precision floating point math. Folding doesn't use or need double precision and has been designed to run on commercial cards. For folding, there is no advantage to Teslas. The power consumption is probably similar but I haven't looked that carefully.

[thelightguy1]

I think this is appropriate to ask. What on Earth is the energy consumption of your farm?

[AtlasFolder]

The farm draws 13,000 Watts continuous.

[SrslyLeeroy]

Did the city lose power when they plugged that in?

[murder00redrum]

It helps scientists with number crunching, in formulas that could help cure a lot of today's diseases.

[TheR00ler]

But will you be able to play skyrim?

[dawgp0und]

@Filmer1eX Why???

[SRSpoony]

will it play minesweeper ?

[Atheismrulez]

Atlas, what would be the size and cost for a rack suited for smaller folding farms? Also, do you think the new AMD Opteron 6272 16-core will be any good for folding -bigadv under the new rules?

[Filmer1eX]

If I had that kind of computing power I would use it for bruteforcing stuff, lol

[EyesOnMeStudios]

Just thinking, are these acting as single machines or are they clustered??

If not clustered, would you see a higher throughput if they were? or would that take up to much of the gigabit ethernet bandwidth? Also (last question sorry) Is there a bottleneck at the NIC or rather the HDD???? Thanks and REALLY nice setup

[ibondurmom]

@b0bthekillar

this is 2 years ago...

[Ang3lsCurse]

@railfan844 No it doesn't. The limitation is 4 graphics cards in SLI/CROSSFIRE. You can fold a pair of quad sli/fire - 8 seperate seperate cards depending on how many PCI-E 2.0 slots/lanes are available on your motherboard. I am not sure if it's a limitation in windows or something else, I cannot remember. :)

[b0bthekillar]

how do we know you're not using this for bit coin mining?