Everybody knows that FAH in on the PS3. The Gates Foundation has given money to Rosetta.($10Mil if not mistaken) So what's the hold-up? Well the higher ups at Micro have yet to see real world results other than a few dozen published papers (mostly on distibuted computing) from any distributed project.

Qustion: So why not take matters into our own hands?
1. While powerful the XNA development software doesn't allow access to networking. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)
2. Some projects require very high FPU precision.. no sure if the 360 is capable of that as a device designed for gaming.
3. XNA does not allow the low level acces needed to the GPU need for a GPU based client.

Am I wrong about the above or are there work arounds?

I am programmer and waiting on a 360 soon. I WILL be looking into porting the software. I will also do what I can to figure out workarounds, but I would like community support in this. I've been a long time FAH member and if I manage to accomplish this I will upload the software and make the code/instructions for use available, but I'm only one person and don't have a 360 yet.

Any ideas?

Where is the BOINC source available?

One more thing might be to port the FoldIt game... Then gamers have more than one reason to help and not just with spare cycles. Competion!! Now almost every gamer likes that word.

porting BOINC would be relatively easy - you'd have to port the science programs as well (i.e. Rosetta in this case) which might prove very difficult.

The Gates Foundation has given money to Rosetta.($10Mil if not mistaken) So what's the hold-up? Well the higher ups at Micro have yet to see real world results other than a few dozen published papers (mostly on distibuted computing) from any distributed project.

I'm fairly sure the reason MS didn't do further work on helping R@H onto the xbox is the xbox's tendancy to RROD which is due to overheating. Any CPU/GPU intense DC applications would only contribute to this already massive cost for them.

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@ Kreationz

That would be huge. It would be great if it were an official client, but even an unsigned application would be significant, I would guess.

@ dcdc

You've probably hit the nail on the head. I wonder if it could be built with CPU throttling? Does the 360 have heat sensors?

I feel I should point out that the Gates Foundation is no Microsoft. And that a grant from the foundation to participate in a global team of scientists on AIDS research should not imply any association, or participation from Microsoft.

The source code for Rosetta and Fold.it is not available to the public. But there are license agreements available for acedemic researchers. And if your goal was to port it, I would guess a license for that would be permitted as well... but you have to keep in mind that Dr. Baker knows how Rosetta works, and he's already posted that the memory requirements to run Rosetta exceed what is supported on alternate platforms. And so another generation of such alternative platforms would be required before a port could begin.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I feel I should point out that the Gates Foundation is no Microsoft. And that a grant from the foundation to participate in a global team of scientists on AIDS research should not imply any association, or participation from Microsoft.

I understand they are separate entities and MS is a for profit business.
I have Red Ringed a release 360 just playing games before, but maybe adding in some sort of sleep cycle may be able to overcome the heat limitations I plan on external cooling as it is. Besides you also can't under estimate the value of PR. My older brother bought a PS3 just to use for FAH an a Linux Box. He's a tinkerer, but now he also plays games on it.

The source code for Rosetta and Fold.it is not available to the public. But there are license agreements available for acedemic researchers. And if your goal was to port it, I would guess a license for that would be permitted as well...

I surely hope so I plan on working with other projects on this as well, but first things first and that is porting BOINC and without XBOX Live! well I plan on a secondary app on a connected pc doing the network part of things.

but you have to keep in mind that Dr. Baker knows how Rosetta works, and he's already posted that the memory requirements to run Rosetta exceed what is supported on alternate platforms. And so another generation of such alternative platforms would be required before a port could begin.

Well if that is the case at least projects with smaller requirements (or maybe batches of small work units) might be able to be ported or maybe in conjunction with an outside source or a kinda of virtual ram (aka a page file) similar to what to PC uses could be utilized. I realize all projects would need to be ported, but most project managers I think would see the benefits.

Edit:One Final note I should probably be having this discussion at the BOINC forum and my first work unit finished last night for Rosetta.

I just want to encourage Kreationz. Very cool that you want to contribute!

Right now I think the holy grail for Rostta@home would probably be GPUs rather than consoles, because new hardware comes out more often and they are starting to get more memory and be designed with GPGPU and double-precision math in mind..

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I just want to encourage Kreationz. Very cool that you want to contribute!

Right now I think the holy grail for Rostta@home would probably be GPUs rather than consoles, because new hardware comes out more often and they are starting to get more memory and be designed with GPGPU and double-precision math in mind..

absolutely - I believe programming for GPUs would be a much better investment - the platform is open, there's a much greater resource available, much more power available, probably quite a lot of help available, BOINC already supports them, and there's no RROD problems/risks.

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absolutely - I believe programming for GPUs would be a much better investment - the platform is open, there's a much greater resource available, much more power available, probably quite a lot of help available, BOINC already supports them, and there's no RROD problems/risks.

Exactly. My thoughts about GPU & distributing computing can be found here:

http://michaelgr.com/2008/08/17/graphics-processing-units-gpus-the-future-of-scientific-distributed-computing/

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i attended the east coast boinc meeting at u delaware, and david anderson would seem to agree with the idea that gpu's will drive a majority of the future performance increase. he's already talking about exaflops possibly within the next 3-5 years.

i attended the east coast boinc meeting at u delaware, and david anderson would seem to agree with the idea that gpu's will drive a majority of the future performance increase. he's already talking about exaflops possibly within the next 3-5 years.

I'd be happy with just a few PetaFlops, ExaFlops... wow, isn't that like a 1000 TeraFlops? At 70-75 T-Flops, we've got a couple orders of magnitude yet to go here :D

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i attended the east coast boinc meeting at u delaware, and david anderson would seem to agree with the idea that gpu's will drive a majority of the future performance increase. he's already talking about exaflops possibly within the next 3-5 years.

I'd be happy with just a few PetaFlops, ExaFlops... wow, isn't that like a 1000 TeraFlops? At 70-75 T-Flops, we've got a couple orders of magnitude yet to go here :D

I believe a Petaflop is 1000TFlops...
ExaFlop would be 1000 PetaFlops :S ??

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I believe a Petaflop is 1000TFlops...
ExaFlop would be 1000 PetaFlops :S ??

Yes, I believe thats correct :)

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or, another way of saying the same thing, 1,000,000 tflops...

Some time ago I asked here, at SETI and SIMAP if anyone are interested to try, if the still existing SETI or SIMAP binaries for Linux on PPC work on the XBOX360. - No one anwsered. Primarly the XBOX is a three core PPC G5 CPU with 3 GHz.
Some had dubts that the Linux installation is illegal - what I don't think so. Others had dubts about the overheating - I think, that the CPU throtteling capatibilities within the BOINC client could help...

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