FAH on mobile devices [Android 4.4+ Only for now]

[theteofscuba]

I like the idea of having a folding monitor app on smart phone or tablet. very nice.

[JS1982]

I would say this will become a GO soon, as Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 at the CES 2014 today
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1

365 GFLOPS @ 5 Watts I would say there are possibilities coming up.
It is more power then a PS3 or XBOX360 with only 1/20th of the power draw.

[Jim Saunders]

I would say this will become a GO soon, as Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 at the CES 2014 today
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1

365 GFLOPS @ 5 Watts I would say there are possibilities coming up.
It is more power then a PS3 or XBOX360 with only 1/20th of the power draw.

I can be convinced, but I'll believe that when I see it.

Jim

[7im]

I would say this will become a GO soon, as Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 at the CES 2014 today
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1

365 GFLOPS @ 5 Watts I would say there are possibilities coming up.
It is more power then a PS3 or XBOX360 with only 1/20th of the power draw.

365 GFLOPS of pixel data means nothing to GFLOPS of folding data. Apples to Oranges.

Go? Ya, maybe. No mention of OpenCL support, so no assurance to support core 17. Strike One? It does have 192 CUDA cores and 1 SMX, which is exactly half of one low powered 740M GPU, making K1 very low powered, computationally speaking. May not make the deadlines on core 15. Strike Two? That assumes that the now EndOfLife core 15 is still around by the time this comes to market, or else it may not fold. Strike Three?

[7im]

Also makes you wonder why they compared the K1 to an old PS3 and an old XBox instead of the current gen of gaming consoles?

[JS1982]

I tried to be positive, but whipped of the table this way... Damn... But you know more tech details, so guess you're right...

And we need positivity so much right now. Look at the amount of active cpu's mentioned on the site (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... e=osstats2)
This number is dropping with around 1 thousand every day for a while now... We need to go up, not down...

[7im]

I'll be glad when the core_17 stats numbers are fixed. Then we'll see if all the Chicken Littles about the falling skies, er, clients were correct or not. We'll see who eats the crow.

BTW, ATI numbers tripled the last few days while the Core_17 server was offline and people had to fold Core_16 again. (250 active jumped to 750) Not the 2000+ it was earlier this year, but who knows...?

[CygnusXI]

I think mobile folding was dismissed at the appropriate speed. The power (processing wise) and the power (battery life) is not conducive to folding.

If at some time in the future this changes, they will certainly revisit this option. Until then, consider it a no go, and a dead topic.

Boinc already has a mobile app for android, Ive used it before. It also has this very handy option for people that are always on the go and not next to their charger. The option is simply to autostart the client when the phone is plugged in. I have a small collection of android devices, a dual core and two quad cores. the quad cores are always by a charger in my car or home or at the office. Personally, I would run FAH on my mobile devices almost 24/7 . Being that I used to be in the cell phone business (tech department of course ) I still have some contacts and could help promote an app like this in store fronts.

There are many things about x86 and ARM that are different. ARM has some real advantages in the way it processes data. ARM should not be dismissed as a possible folding platform. A lot of phones that are coming out today and the processor in my nexus 7 tablet and GS3 can probably outperform some cpus people are folding on today. Oh, the boinc app even has the ability to use the phones built in gpu.... UK has already released an eight core ARM phone, i think its the Note 3 UK version.

Its been a while since Ive paid attention to the ARM inner workings but I do know they have advantages that if used properly could be used for certain tasks very efficiently.

Porting to ARM should not be hard to do with android since its linux based. Makes me wish I had the extra time to look into this, I dare say with enough time I could port the command line linux FAH client into ARM. Im sure there would be some dependencies that would have to be recompiled to ARM as well before compiling the final ARM client. If anyone wants to tackle this Ill be standing by with what android knowledge I still remember from being a cell phone tech.

When I ran Boinc on my phone the heat level was not very bad either...

Another very big part to consider, is that as of Oct 2013 there were over 40 million GS4 phones sold ( high speed quad core ARMs with Im quite sure what is an Nvidia based gpu). And that is only the GS4 up to last october, and it continues to sell like hotcakes. The power of the mobile network is nothing to be under estimated.

----- EDIT - my battery held up pretty good even when not on the charger using the boinc app

[7im]

Please read back through this thread or the six others just like it that already explains why arm does not work for fah.

And the BOINC client on a phone is a gimmick. It doesn't do much science at all.

[CygnusXI]

I have reviewed the thread, I must first point out most of these posts up until the last page are from 2010-2011, rather outdated. The post about the seti app is actually incorrect from its current state. It may have been like that years ago but its now utilizes even the built in GPU on high end phones. ( correct me if im wrong there but when i tried that app not long ago it seemed pretty advanced, not like what I read reported here)

Also, the post about phones /ARMs being measured in mflops is very outdated. The current standard for for good arm phone GPU's is something like the ARM Mali-T628 600 MHz \ per shader and clocks in at 115.2 GFLOPS. This is already being out done by the Mali t760 and other chips that put out roughly 330 Gflops. Most phones also come with 2-3 gigs of ram now as well. One must also consider there are about 1.5 billion smart phone users that upgrade their phones every few years.

Just my two cents, I think the original poster had an idea that now holds ground, or certainly will in the future as these devices continue to overpower the old standards of x86 and mobile GPUs / CPU's. Im going to make a prediction and say, some day down the line this app will eventually exist. Maybe it will take years, but I don't think ARM is going to slow down progress with the high demand for fast mobile devices. There are opencl bench tests you can download and try on your phone.

[bruce]

FACT: There a lot of mobile devices out there.
FACT: The speed with which current technology hardware can compute increases with each new hardware generation.
FACT: The power needed to perform a fixed set of computations decreases with each new hardware generation.
FACT: Battery power is a significant limitation to what mobile devices can do.

There is an important distinction between integer computation and floating point computation and realistically, they're done by different hardware components. In the early days of desktop computing, the 8086 had an optional "math coprocessor called the 8087 which lot of computers never needed. That trend continued beyond the 80386 + 80387 and it wasn't until the Pentium was developed that both functions were integrated onto a single piece of silicon. Mobile hardware has been going through a similar evolutionary path although most floating point operations have migrated from the CPU to the GPU.

Why is this important? Two reasons: Because the hardware designer has to make tradeoffs and (s)he can allocate more or less area to the floating vs integer. Because some DC projects are based mainly on integer operations and others are based mainly on floating point operations. (For FAH, float speed is critical.)

The idea of only using power when the device is on the charger is probably a good idea since having a dead battery on your phone certainly limits its usefulness (and that option is already part of the standard FAH client for laptops).

I think it's reasonable to assume that the potential contribution to DC projects (including FAH) by mobile devices will eventually reach some critical level but will absolutely refrain from predicting when that might happen, particularly for a project like FAH because of its need for continuous high levels of computation compared to the low computational capabilities of mobile hardware. (It's a lot like a parent trying to answer the kids' question "are we there yet?" except we've never driven this way before and we don't have a GPS that can predict it for us.)

[7im]

CygnusXI, not all GFLOPS are created equal. Please specify how those are measured and where quoted from so we can update ourselves... Integer Ops means nothing to FAH. Floating Point Ops means everything.

[Foxbat]

It's baa-ack! From Sony's announcement from last week's International CES®:
http://blogs.sonymobile.com/2015/01/12/ ... s-disease/

[CBT]

Could anyone update the title of this thread by removing the '[Not]':
https://folding.stanford.edu/home/new-i ... n-android/

TIA,

Corné

[7im]

[Not] to [Sony Only]?