Can I use my GPU for WCG ?

[DAK1640]

I saw at least 1 person using their GPU for folding. How do we do this? Are bthere any limitations as to what type of GPU can be used?

[[XC]Atomicpineapple]

ATI X1900 series GPUs can be used for Folding@Home, currently no other application supports GPUs for folding/crunching etc.

[RickH]

Sorry, can't be done for WCG. In fact, it can only be done for Folding@Home right now, and only with very specific ATI GPUs and video driver versions. The F@H gang have been working with the ATI gang for a long time on this, and it'll take a lot of work for anyone else to rewrite their science apps (basically from scratch) to do this.

I expect the other DC projects will watch and see how the F@H experiment goes, and let the technology mature a bit and see what the actual rewards are. If it's really massively faster than a CPU, it'll be worth the huge effort it'll take to convert. Preliminary results appear mixed; the GPU can be very fast, but it requires a heavy load on the CPU to keep the GPU fed and busy, so you can't really do anything else with the machine while the GPU crunches (well, you could still use the other cores on a multi-core).

Another thing feeding this is that upcoming versions of BOINC will start reporting more hardware info back to the servers, allowing the projects to see in more detail just what CPUs and GPUs are actually used by their crunchers. This will factor into the project's decision about what kind of optimized clients would be worth writing (and allow BOINC to send the right one to each user).

This is really out on the bleeding edge... don't expect it to be available for many months at least (or even a year or more). But it's pretty cool!

[Fr3ak]

Too bad GPU programming is a lot worse than "usual" programming.
I bet it will take quite some time to get it working with other boinc apps than f@H.
But the WCG staff said they wont optimize the project's clients they get, so I doubt they will do develop a GPU compatible client.