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[FAH] More news on the ClearSpeed front
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Moderator Emeritus  Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: College Park, MD
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Thread in question: http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?t=5934
Specific quotes (in chronological order)
From Vijay Pande (Head of FAH)
We're meeting with the ClearSpeed CEO & technical team on Thursday. I'm excited that we will be able to collaborate on something neat.
It's still early since there are no production boards right now, but that will come in time
Press release
ClearSpeed Technology, developer of high performance, low power, programmable microprocessor solutions, today announced that some of the most computationally-intensive inner loops of GROMACS, a molecular dynamics software application, are now ported and off-loaded to ClearSpeed's PCI plug-in accelerator card
regarding a bulk purchase
That may indeed be a possibility. If we could get some sort of commitment to buy from enough people (eg 100), that would easily do it. The only problem would be if people start to back out after committing.
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Even in large quantities, the price won't go below $1000/CPU for a while. My best hope is ~$1500 for a dual CPU board.
Anyway, this is all conjecture until ClearSpeed gets back to me about the possibilities.
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(posted today)
Once we get the next gen boards in our lab, we'll publish benchmarks, etc. I don't expect that for at least a few months (had to say exactly when).
I've been watching the ClearSpeed processors since they came out, and while they are expensive, they are very powerful. I know I'm not the only farmer who spent at least $1500 on farm equipment, and these boards use much less power. If the major projects that are FPU intensive were to port their core to work with the ClearSpeed boards, it would open up a whole new avenue for farming.
While they might be too costly for most people here (including me with my current funds), it probably wouldn't be out of reach for the team as a whole to put together a dual opteron box with 4 PCI-X slots, which could then be populated with as many as four of the CS boards, for around $7500 (assuming $1500/board). While that sounds like a lot of money, it equates to well over 100GHz of current production, if current estimates are to be believed.
I'm keeping an even closer eye on them, and it'd be great if some other projects could be convinced to port to the CS chips as well.
Note that the CS boards would be used as coprocessors, not standalone CPUs.
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Senior User
Join Date: Mar 2003
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ok so a quick flick through the statsshows that there may possibally just be 100 people meaning approx 750 each.
i would be ok with that if i had that but at the moment i have about £200 with a £1000 debt.
the other question would be - who gets the points?
my suggestion there is that another user is set up for this computer.
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MacbookPro dual 2Ghz 1GB Ram 128 Graphics
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Moderator Emeritus Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: College Park, MD
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Originally posted by billybob128:
ok so a quick flick through the statsshows that there may possibally just be 100 people meaning approx 750 each.
i would be ok with that if i had that but at the moment i have about £200 with a £1000 debt.
the other question would be - who gets the points?
my suggestion there is that another user is set up for this computer.
If this were to pan out, I'm not expecting people to donate huge amounts of money, it was more just pointing out what these things can do. It'll be something great to further explore if the CS boards become available.
If we did something like that, it'd for sure be a team account.
What interests me is the possibility of (at least for the specific case of DC projects) the boards working ok with only a normal PCI slot. If that's the case, even if I could only put one board in a computer, that'd still give me room for 7 boards, and that's way more money then I have anyway 
EDIT: FYI, your math is off by a zero. 100 people contributing would be $75 each, not $750 each.
(Last edited by Scotttheking; Oct 26, 2004 at 09:31 PM.
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Senior User
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FYI, your math is off by a zero. 100 people contributing would be $75 each, not $750 each.
my bad it was late and i was tired - sorry bout that
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MacbookPro dual 2Ghz 1GB Ram 128 Graphics
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Chico, CA and Carlsbad, CA.
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75's a lot better than 750.
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"In Nomine Patris, Et Fili, Et Spiritus Sancti"
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Moderator Emeritus Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: College Park, MD
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With luck, we'll have sold info about performance and cost in the next 4-6 months. Once that comes, we can decide if building a team box is worth it or not.
Hopefully by then I'll have myself a system that can take some of those cards  (now if I can just get the money for one or more cards)
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