Saturday, March 24, 2007

Folding Proteins


Is it not ironic? I work at a super computing center, yet it turns out that world first petaflop/s computer will be housed right here in my living room in Lelystad. Well, at least a part of that machine will be. Expect the first petaflop/s to be reached this weekend, thanks to the PS/3 implementation of the Folding at Home code. Something amazing has happened here... a handful of PS/3's (currently 20K of them) dwarfed the contribution of the 200K regular PCs. As a matter of fact, if all PCs running folding at home were switched off, computational capacity of the folding at home initiative would hardly be impacted. I have to keep an eye on my energy bill though, as the PS/3 consumes 200Watt. At roughly 20 eurocent per KWatt-hour, it is costing me approximately 1 euro per day. The image of this blog-entry shows the Villin protein, that my PS/3 is currently simulating. One last note: the special purpose computer MDGrape-3 claims to have already reached the petaflop/s milestone.

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