Rosetta At Home Distributed Folding Coming to Xbox 360? Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Rosetta At Home Distributed Folding Coming to Xbox 360? Posted by XanTium | March 29 21:47 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From gizmodo.com: [QUOTE] Last week I asked Microsoft to bring Folding@Home to the Xbox 360 to add a boatload of computing power to the Alzheimer's fight. Well, Folding@Home isn't the only distributed protein-folding program around, don't-cha know. There's also Rosetta@Home, a program that happened to receive over $10 million from the Gates Foundation for HIV research last year. Meanwhile, Xbox Live has been opened to developers via the XNA Game Developers Framework for about a year, allowing people to develop programs on their own for the system. Like... folding programs? When asked about it on the project's message board, head scientist and developer David Baker said that "we have been discussing this idea with Microsoft quite a bit over the past several weeks; I will keep everybody posted." [/QUOTE] Full Story: gizmodo.com

[grim_d]

im all up for stuff like this, anything that can help people.

as long as it's not seti.

[Alkane]

Like leaving the Xbox 360 on 24/7 is good for an already badly put together machine... The more machines make it past the warranty cut-off the better for Microsoft, no need to start stress testing machines on a large scale ; )

[troyBORG]

The 360 already does enough heat. From running Seti on my PC i know it really can heat it up.

(I would spike up to around 63C in my CPU core when running seti [P4 3ghz with a Zalman fan])

[ILLusions0fGrander]

im all for the good causes.. enable it and ill be down, just not 24/7

edit: i knew troyBORG looked familiar.. seen you posted on the shadowrun forums a bit.

This post has been edited by ILLusions0fGrander: Mar 30 2007, 04:05 AM

[d-range]

Yeah that would be really impressive, rosetta@home or folding@home running on a single core as sandboxed bytecode. That will surely show how powerful the 360 is when compared to the PS3's folding@home numbers...

I don't think this is going to happen because it will make the 360 look really bad....

This post has been edited by d-range: Mar 30 2007, 09:03 AM

[steveju]

I don't think this is going to happen because it will make the 360 look really bad....

Care to elaborate a bit on that?

I don't see how 10M Xb360's couldn't beat 2-4M PS3's

EDIT: There's no way the XB360 can beat my crappy Athlon XP CPU, it has a temp of +60C on idle.

This post has been edited by steveju: Mar 30 2007, 09:20 AM

[twistedsymphony]

Like leaving the Xbox 360 on 24/7 is good for an already badly put together machine... The more machines make it past the warranty cut-off the better for Microsoft, no need to start stress testing machines on a large scale ; )

Even if you believe that, wouldn't it be GOOD to have tons of people "stress testing" their machines?

If the consoles really are as fragile as you speculate it means that they'd start breaking on a large scale. At that point MS would have no choice but to admit problems and start doing recalls.

No matter which way you slice it it's beneficial to the consumers.

[Alkane]

Even if you believe that, wouldn't it be GOOD to have tons of people "stress testing" their machines?

If the consoles really are as fragile as you speculate it means that they'd start breaking on a large scale. At that point MS would have no choice but to admit problems and start doing recalls.

No matter which way you slice it it's beneficial to the consumers.

Exactly my point. The machines hanging on by a hair would die and cause more expense to Microsoft. Better for the consumer yes, but a potentially large loss for Microsoft.

[89c4l98]

$640.93 for my PS3
$422.94 for my 360
$45 for xbox live one year
$505.04 for games
$2100 for 61" dlp
___________
$3713.91 total... so unless someone wants to pay me to do folding or rosetta or seti they can lick my butt.

[throwingks]

$640.93 for my PS3
$422.94 for my 360
$45 for xbox live one year
$505.04 for games
$2100 for 61" dlp
___________
$3713.91 total... so unless someone wants to pay me to do folding or rosetta or seti they can lick my butt.

I'm confused. Folding is free, and done when you aren't using your system. Why did you balance your check book?

This post has been edited by throwingks: Mar 30 2007, 03:07 PM

[Landlocked]

Here's an idea...why doesn't the great philanthropist Bill Gates (in all seriousness here!) award users Microsoft Points for this project???

[d-range]

Care to elaborate a bit on that?

I don't see how 10M Xb360's couldn't beat 2-4M PS3's

EDIT: There's no way the XB360 can beat my crappy Athlon XP CPU, it has a temp of +60C on idle.

Well, about 25k PS3's already outperform 200k PC's + 12k Macs *combined* (see http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats). Maybe that already clears things up for you.

Point is, the PS3 architecture is extremely well-suited for these kinds of applications, because they use highly parallelizable algorithms. The architecture of the Xbox 360 could do pretty well compared to the PS3, if used to its full potention, but even then it would be nowhere near the PS3's. Remember the PS3 has 7 DSP cores @3.2 GHz available that can operate completely independent of each other, with a PPC core to coordinate everyhting and handle the general-purpose stuff. A 360 has 3 PPC cores at 3Ghz. XNA uses only 1 (one) of them, and it doesn't even use it to its full potential as XNA code is interpreted bytecode, which can be assumed to have at least 10 to 20% performance overhead.

I would guess a native folding@home client using all three cores would probably perform at about 50% of a PS3, but that's just a guesstimate.

This post has been edited by d-range: Mar 30 2007, 07:00 PM

[Martinchris23]

$640.93 for my PS3
$422.94 for my 360
$45 for xbox live one year
$505.04 for games
$2100 for 61" dlp
___________
$3713.91 total... so unless someone wants to pay me to do folding or rosetta or seti they can lick my butt.

Looking at the amount of money you've spent, maybe any 'butt-licking' should be reserved for you and your Bank manager ??

[bucko]

Nice, just I think this should be run on the 65NM boxes / OR speed up the fan speed to max.

I run folding@home on my Mac, PC and parents PC so I've never tried Rosetta before, interesting. I used to do Seti, but I figured curing this stuff is more important than finding aliens with small bodies and big heads.