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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: running BOINC on the GPU of a system ??? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 14
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trevorcolby00
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Aug 11, 2005 Post Count: 101 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi, just a quick question : We know already, that NVIDIa and AMD are showing H.264 Video encoding benchmakrs using their GPUs instead of the CPU of a system. Of course, most of this software is still in devolpment but
----------------------------------------are there any plans to improve BOINC that it could take use of the immense power of a GPU ? Tests has shown that a High Class GPU is 10 times faster in H.264 Video encoding then the fastest intel CPU. are there any plans to improve BOINC ? That would be a blast - and it could improve WCG much much more.  |
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Jord
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Dec 30, 2005 Post Count: 148 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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are there any plans to improve BOINC that it could take use of the immense power of a GPU ? Yes: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/AppCoprocessor
Tears in my eyes
How they fall like rain to the floor |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
are there any plans to improve BOINC that it could take use of the immense power of a GPU ? Yes: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/AppCoprocessor Don't the science apps need to be written for GPUs also? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello esoteric17,
Yes, the applications have to be written to run on a GPU, but there has to be a version of BOINC that runs on a GPU to board the applications for. It is not easy to run on GPUs. Folding@Home has been working on this for years. They have released an application for ATI, but they are keeping their Nvidia application in Beta for debug. I think that they were programming the ATI application in 2005 and the Nvidia application in 2006. Lawrence |
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GIBA
Ace Cruncher Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Post Count: 5374 Status: Offline |
Lawrence,
----------------------------------------could you please let we know if WCG Adm and science teams are planning to use it like folding@home or in similar way in near future ? Rgds. gib@
Cheers ! GIB@
  Join BRASIL - BRAZIL@GRID team and be very happy ! http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=DF99KT5DN1 |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello GIBA,
None of the projects under development are currently planning to use GPUs. It will take a group of scientists that want to expend the effort to learn GPU programming. But that is unlikely. Most scientists concentrate on their own research fields and spend as little time learning programming as they can get away with. I understand that sort of thinking. It would be unusual for anyone but a computer scientist to want to spend extra time on programming. Lawrence |
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JmBoullier
Former Community Advisor Normandy - France Joined: Jan 26, 2007 Post Count: 3716 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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could you please let we know if WCG Adm and science teams are planning to use it like folding@home or in similar way in near future ? Hi Giba! Since you are a regular participant of the WCG fora I would have thought that you had noticed that almost every week there is one CA or another who clearly says that there is no such plan in a near future. We cannot be as categoric regarding what could happen within years but, still, we are not leaving too much hope, for the reasons given by Lawrence and for several others that you can find if you reread the many threads where this question has been asked (try a search on "GPU"; 248 posts currently!). If the science applications were written by computer geeks there might be a better probability, but since they are written by scientists you know the story. Cheers. Jean. |
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GIBA
Ace Cruncher Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Post Count: 5374 Status: Offline |
thanks guys.
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Cheers ! GIB@
Join BRASIL - BRAZIL@GRID team and be very happy ! http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=DF99KT5DN1 |
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E. Frijters
Senior Cruncher The Netherlands Joined: Apr 26, 2007 Post Count: 228 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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If the science applications were written by computer geeks there might be a better probability, but since they are written by scientists you know the story. Is there any chance we can put these two groups together in one room? My guess is that there are a lot of geeks that would love to participate...
Former grid.org slave
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello E. Frijters,
APL has never become a popular programming language. A good substitute is to structure a program around the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) library. Either way, it is easy to compile for near optimal use of SSE instructions. These approaches bring out parallelisms and make them fairly obvious. Which would be a good start for GPU programming. I shudder to think of the years it would take for somebody to understand a complicated program that had not been written this way (with fairly explicit parallelism) and convert spaghetti code into GPU code. Faster to spend years teaching the original programmer to code GPUs and let him do the frustrating rewrite. My personal opinion is that this is not easy. But maybe somebody will prove me wrong. Lawrence |
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