The Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel
Mackay, Richards et al., Nature
North Carolina State University's Trudy Mackay and her colleagues present the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel, "a community resource for analysis of population genomics and quantitative traits."
Folding@home, Not So Well...
November 30, 2009
At the recent SC09 meeting in Portland, OR, Stanford University's Imran Haque and Vijay Pande gave a presentation on the problems inherent in GPGPU computing due to a lack of error checking and correction in the memory systems of many graphics cards. They presented the results of a large-scale GPU error rate assessment test using MemtestG80, a software tool for assessing memory error rates on NVIDIA G80-architecture-based GPUs. While testing consumer-grade and dedicated-GPGPU hardware in a controlled environment resulted in no errors, results were dramatically — and perhaps alarmingly different — for consumer cards installed in real-world environments. After running MemtestG80 on roughly 20,000 hosts on the Folding@home network, they found that the majority of consumer-grade cards demonstrated what they called a "non-negligible, pattern-sensitive rate of memory soft errors." In other words, the data coming off of the Folding@home grid could possibly be in need of some serious quality control.
It's really good news!
It's really good news!