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Back in my day we cooperated to advance medicine and science with folding@home. How times change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wik

Back in my day we cooperated to advance medicine and science with folding@home. How times change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

cntrmmbrpsswrd 2y ago
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home. I suppose this is different, since I'd wager it'll end up being used primarily by for-profit projects.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  It's strange how society psychology changes so much. SETI and Folding were huge in scale but not in hype.
EduardoBautista 2y ago
folding@home was used in the “console wars” to justify one’s choice of the PS3 over the Xbox 360. Was the cell processor in the PS3 really that efficient for this purpose?
- TkTech 2y ago
  It was a fairly unique architecture that had some pros and cons. In reality what made it a winner was the steep subsidy by Sony (units were sold at a loss, making the assumption you would buy a few games) and the availability (later removed) of an official Linux distribution.
  - luigi23 2y ago
    very few cared about linux. it was mostly hd-dvd (later dvd) vs blu-ray.
- kuschku 2y ago
  It was basically an all-purpose vector computing monster focused on SIMD. You could use it for physics simulations, animations, tesselation, etc. Basically everything you'd use a compute shader for nowadays. That's why emulators need AVX512 support to match the PS3. It was incredibly powerful. Obviously, in that era's single-threaded world no engine could make use of that functionality and few knew how to program for it. It was ahead of its time, by quite a while.
  - fl0ki 2y ago
    Remember around that time when the industry said that OpenCL would allow write-once run-everywhere compute code for a booming industry of diverse and competitive compute devices? I fell for that scam for a couple of years, before very fortunately getting a different job for long enough to watch the collapse from a safe distance.
AbstractH24 2y ago
Thought the same thing when I read this. How times have and haven't changed.

Back in my day we cooperated to advance medicine and science with folding@home. How times change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

cntrmmbrpsswrd 2y ago

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home. I suppose this is different, since I'd wager it'll end up being used primarily by for-profit projects.

agumonkey 2y ago
It's strange how society psychology changes so much. SETI and Folding were huge in scale but not in hype.

EduardoBautista 2y ago

folding@home was used in the “console wars” to justify one’s choice of the PS3 over the Xbox 360. Was the cell processor in the PS3 really that efficient for this purpose?

TkTech 2y ago
It was a fairly unique architecture that had some pros and cons. In reality what made it a winner was the steep subsidy by Sony (units were sold at a loss, making the assumption you would buy a few games) and the availability (later removed) of an official Linux distribution.
- luigi23 2y ago
  very few cared about linux. it was mostly hd-dvd (later dvd) vs blu-ray.
kuschku 2y ago
It was basically an all-purpose vector computing monster focused on SIMD. You could use it for physics simulations, animations, tesselation, etc. Basically everything you'd use a compute shader for nowadays. That's why emulators need AVX512 support to match the PS3. It was incredibly powerful. Obviously, in that era's single-threaded world no engine could make use of that functionality and few knew how to program for it. It was ahead of its time, by quite a while.
- fl0ki 2y ago
  Remember around that time when the industry said that OpenCL would allow write-once run-everywhere compute code for a booming industry of diverse and competitive compute devices? I fell for that scam for a couple of years, before very fortunately getting a different job for long enough to watch the collapse from a safe distance.

AbstractH24 2y ago

Thought the same thing when I read this. How times have and haven't changed.