There is a distributed computing project called Folding@Home that is spearheaded by a group of researchers at Stanford.
Folding@home simulates the way in which protein chains, which are comprised of amino acids, coil and fold into three-dimensional structures.
This past week, the development team announced additional support for ATI’s line of Radeon GPUs. While this is not the first time academia has put GPUs to scientific use, it underscores the sheer brute force that video cards are now capable of; in this case, it is estimated to perform around 100 gigaflops per GPU.
To put that into perspective, I have discussed GPU and CPU theoretical benchmarks this past week and noted that no desktop CPU is currently capable of achieving anything near that number (the newest ones, such as Intel’s Core Duo achieve about half of that). [Note: the IBM-designed Xenos CPU found in the XBox 360 hits over 100 gigaflops on paper, however it is not a general purpose CPU]
It should also be noted that with chipmaker AMD’s purchase of ATI, several reports have predicted that GPU’s and CPU’s will be manufactured on the same die before the end of the decade.
System-on-chip anyone? See also, Moore’s Law Meets Its Match