Folding Forum

So I am building a dedicated folding machine and I have a spare GTX 970 with linux mint....but was wondering if this Intel BC31S1P Xeon Phi 31S1P Coprocessor, would be good for folding if configured correctly. I know that the original technology this card is built on was for Scientific calculations like folding but thats about it, doing some more in depth research now but figured it couldn't hurt to ask, especially since now you can pick these up at a mid level GPU price point......not thousands of dollars.

At the present time, FAH has not identified the BC31S1P as a supported device. Support for CPUs includes code for SSE* (so "properly configured" might be a problem) and for GPUs, for devices listed here.

Nothing is known about possible future support but they tend to focus their support on hardware and operating systems commonly found in home computers.

Yeah I figured, but I did find the below information posted awhile back, but I think that was when these things were $1k+. Now that they can be had for $150-$250, maybe its time to revisit compatibility not sure what it would take..........heck.......If PG wanted a tester or two I know a couple, and I would acquire one as well for testing....just ping me.

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/f ... ce/#ntoc14

And then this from Intel:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articl ... oprocessor

The performance if you just take the current cores and slap them on (not something we can do - this is second hand info from PG) is not good. Additionally, where the Phi is really competitive is double precision, which F@h doesn't currently use extensively. So, because it would take a decent bit of work and the performance in the end isn't great, we probably won't see Phi support for this Gen of Phi. The next one might get a higher adoption though.

Also, those cheap Phis are passive. I got one (for the learning experience and because they were so cheap) and it is a bit of a pain to get adequate cooling. I do have it working now, and it is fun to see 700+ GFlops DP Linpack performance

I'll probably try to see if I can get any OpenCL apps working on it, perhaps even try BOINC (though it is doubtful that will work).