Folding@home on soundcards? [Not very likely]

[DarkElfa]

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.

[Beberg]

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.

[VijayPande]

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

[DarkElfa]

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.

[EvilAlchemist]

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)

[DarkElfa]

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.

[codysluder]

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.