Stream Computing with ATI Radeon™ products Drive Bio-Medical Research at Stanford University

Today AMD’s ATI Radeon™ GPUs (graphics processor units) help accelerate complex computations in stream computing applications used in scientific research. AMD is supporting bio-medical research to help scientists understand disease at the genetic level. With a strong understanding of how diseases form, it will become possible to develop diagnostic methods, and preventative treatment and medicine for many acute diseases in humans.

Stanford University is using ATI Radeon GPUs to run Folding@Home, a distributed computing project designed by its chemistry department. This application performs computationally intensive simulations of protein folding, using the stream computing capabilities of the latest ATI Radeon graphics processors, which provide incremental power over CPU processing. The University’s research team discovered that AMD’s high performance ATI Radeon graphics cards provide up to 60 times faster processing over CPUs in many of the calculations needed to simulate the folding of proteins.

What is Protein Folding
Proteins are necklaces of amino acids – long chain molecules that drive all biochemical reactions in the human body, helping to build bones, muscles and blood vessels, and helping the body fight infections. To accomplish these tasks, proteins must take on a particular shape, or, to “fold”. Proteins that fold incorrectly can cause complications and can lead to critical diseases. Folding@Home simulates the folding process to understand why proteins don’t fold correctly. The findings will help researchers prevent and cure these diseases.

Folding@Home will help researchers uncover how certain diseases develop, including:

• Cancer
• Alzheimer's Disease
• Parkinson's Disease
• Huntington's Disease
• Osteogenesis Imperfecta

You Can Help Find the Cure
Folding@home uses distributed computing to simulate protein folding – instead of using super computers, the workload is broken up into small work units and distributed across 100,000’s of PC systems over the internet. When users throughout the world download and run the GPU version of the application, they directly contribute to a good cause with the power of their ATI Radeon graphics processor to accelerate the simulation and provide data to Stanford’s researchers faster.

Every new PC that runs the application gets us closer to the cure. You can help by simply downloading and running the Folding@Home application developed by Stanford University. The application is free and secure. It will run in the background, making use of spare GPU capacity in your PC, without impacting the performance of your other applications. You can even increase your contribution by forming and joining teams and competing against others. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@Home website.

Follow these easy steps to help find the cure:

1. Download the latest available ATI Catalyst software suite
2. Download the Folding@Home GPU client application (either console or GUI version)
3. Enter the ATI team number 51394

New beta Folding@Home client announced for ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series GPUs
Stanford has recently released a new Folding@Home GPU beta client that is supported by the ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series and higher and ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 Series and higher families running under Windows® XP and Windows Vista®. This new Folding@Home beta GPU client delivers significant performance improvements in folding calculations, and enables users to fold more complex proteins. Please see the FAQ for more details about the GPU client

Note: The new beta Folding@Home client still has some known issues

• Multi-GPU ATI CrossFireX™ configurations under Windows Vista do not currently work with the new client
• In certain conditions, crashes can occur when running the new beta client concurrently with 3D applications or playing back video content.
• Currently only one of the GPU cores on the ATI Radeon™ HD 3870 X2 can be used by the beta client

Please submit any crash reports and please tell us about any issues on the Folding@Home forums in the "Beta testing the GPU2 win client” sub-forum.

Compatible ATI Radeon Graphics Processors:

The latest GPU Folding@Home client now supports (ATI Catalyst™ 8.3 or later required):

• ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series
• ATI Radeon™ HD 3600 Series
• ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series
• ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Series
• ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 Series
• ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 Series

Previous ATI Radeon™ X1000 Series GPUs (ATI Radeon™ X1600 Series and higher) will only be supported by the previous GPU client