Folding@home

VSPG network down, sysadmins on it

I'll post more info as we get it.

UPDATE 10:46pm PT:  Looks like the issue has been fixed, at least for now.  Apparently this outage was somewhat widespread throughout the Stanford campus.  It was just a network outage (the servers were all up the whole time).

SMP2 preview client (v 6.30)

I've talked about our work with our second generation SMP client (dubbed SMP2).  The goals were to make it work much more simply and easier for donors, namely by getting rid of the need for MPI libraries.  This is no small feat and the bulk of the credit goes to the Gromacs developers who pushed on this.

We have a SMP2 preview client (v6.30) on our High Performance Client Download Page (scroll to the bottom of the page) as well as updated SMP guide and FAQ.  We're still calling this a beta client while we test SMP2.  However, this technology is already part of our new v7 client and our plan is for SMP2 to be a standard part of FAH when the v7 client rolls out of beta testing.  On a side note, the v7 is currently doing well in QA and I hope we'll have an open beta test of it soon, eg in the next few months if not sooner.

GPU3 open beta test continuing well

I wanted to post an update on our GPU3 beta test.  It is going well, so we have put the GPU3 client on our high performance client download page. This new client is required for all Fermi hardware, but also allows pre-Fermi NVIDIA GPUs to access the new GPU3 cores.  These cores are labeled core15 (which has already been extensively tested and is in production right now) as well as a new core16 which will be appearing in testing in the coming weeks. 

We are also working to finish our OpenCL port for ATI GPUs to support GPU3 on ATI, but there are still performance issues for OpenCL on both NVIDIA and ATI which are holding back this release.  You can see more information about the key software behind the GPU3 cores at the OpenMM project website. If you're curious, there is openCL code there for NVIDIA and ATI and we invite the open source OpenCL community to check out this code and see how they can help if interested (note the code is released under an LGPL license).

ATI WU shortage

There has been an ATI WU shortage over the last few days.  We have been working on it during the week, but there have been some unusual circumstances involved this time which has delayed a complete fix.  We have made a temporary fix early Sunday (1AM pacific time) which should help some donors, but are continuing to monitor the situation and expect that a more complete fix will come next week.