Folding Forum

I was just curious if anyone has considered that many people have very powerful sound cards such as the X-fi as well as on board sound chips that could be very useful for doing processing while no in use. I think it would be worth looking into writing a client to make use of Creative chips at least, I mean the X-fi has a very powerful processor.

Even if we had the manpower to do that, almost noone buys and has a sound card anymore. So it's not worth it since we wouldn't have enough clients of that type. Also, they aren't that powerful compared to CPUs and GPUs.

Sound cards aren't programmable the way GPU cards are, so it wouldn't work for us. Also, as Adam mentioned, much fewer FLOPs.

Thanks a bunch guys, I figured you all have probably looked into doing folding on whatever you can and ruled out the no-no's, I was just trying to think outside the box and help.

Off topic, wow, not only did 2 Pande group members respond, but the legendary Vijay Pande himself, I'm honored.

Beberg wrote:almost noone buys and has a sound card anymore.

Before the thread ends ...

Most big gamers do have off-motherboard sound cards.

Not that f@h would run on a sound card .... but i bet those users who have the Quad SLI .. probley have a creative soundcard under the hood as well .... both my main system and my htpc both have x-fi sound cards ... (Creative fan here) but in my view ..worth the money)

I always though that the X-fi cards were programmable, but I can't imagine they would be very powerful. though it would be cool to have them pounding away on proteins 24/7. Sure, it wouldn't be fast but get 20,000 people using them at the same time and it could add up like rain drops.

A very cool dream.

Sound is processed with logic and integer operations. FAH is processed with floating point operations. There's no reason to expect that the programmability of a sound card would be able to run Gromacs, let alone run it fast enough.