NVIDIA Folding@Home GPU Q&A

INTRODUCTION

Folding@home is a distributed computing project run by Vijay Pande and the Pande Group at Stanford Univerity where "people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world." The Folding@home Executive Summary's stated goal is to "understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases" by using "novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease."

Folding@home's Executive Summary explains the folding of proteins this way:

The Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

NVIDIA and CUDA So where does NVIDIA come into play with all this folding and what is CUDA? CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a C programming language compiler and set of devolpment tools developed by NVIDIA that enables programmers to unlock the processing power of GPU's. CUDA allows developers to solve the most complex compute-intensive challenges using the native instruction set and memory of the parallel computational elements of CUDA GPU's. CUDA can also be used to accelerate non-graphical applications, one such being Folding@Home.

Folding with Bjorn3D

Bjorn3D.com has many forum members that fold for a cure. They do it for many reasons. Some do it for fun or for the prizes that they might win in our Distributive Computing Forum. Some do it just for themselves or for someone they love. And some do it for the benefit of all mankind. For whatever the reason is that they fold, we at Bjorn3D are proud of our folding members.

We are also happy and proud to announce that Michael Steele from NVIDIA has taken the time to answer a few questions for us that we here at Bjorn3D have about NVIDIA's contribution to folding and its plans for the future. Before we learn a little bit about Michael and get to the Q&A, let's take a moment to learn a little bit about NVIDIA first.

NVIDIA

Company Info

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro™ products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products.