No, WCG has no GPU enabled projects. There will be a push though in 2009, so is the fluid plan. How, when, what, you can beat me over the head, but it would end in rigor mortis for someone if I told you, not only being handed the remains of the dentals in one of these kidney shaped bowls.

(don't I love teasing )

would love to see projects that run on my graphics cards but if they dont then i wont mind that much

OK A GPU can not perform any type of calculations.
However can we calculate with SMP? Currently on my quad I am with 4 WU. Folding had a SMP client. A WU is on four cores at once. This allows to use the interconnections between cores which greatly increases computing power.
On folding, use of 4 monocore client (as boinc) causes a loss of flops compared to SMP client.

If it can be done on WCG i think it will be great because we need more power . And it will better for the ecology too... Because we will have more flops/electicity.

I've find on the folding blog of Pr.Vijay an article about SMP and Uniprocessor client. He not said BOINC but i think that Vijay think about in this post...

FAH/SMP Q & A

There was a good question in the forum that I thought others would be curious to hear:

From Vijay's blog entries it would seem that the SMP client has some fundamental advantages over running multiple singlecore client, but I can't really think of how that might be. Do you know of some architectural overview of how the MPI stuff is being used in this context?


We could just run multiple independent clients, but this would be throwing away a lot of power. What makes an SMP machine special is that it is more than just the sum of the individual parts (CPU cores), since those cores can talk to each other very fast. In FAH, machines talk to each other when they return WUs to a central server, say once a day. On SMP this happens once a millisecond or so (or faster). That 86,000,000x speed up in communication can be very useful, even if there isn't 100% utilization in the cores themselves.

The easy route would have been to run multiple single-CPU FAH-cores (this is what other projects do), but that would be a big loss for the science, as this throws away a very, very powerful resource (fast interconnects between CPUs). Indeed, it is this sort of fast interconnect which makes a supercomputer "super", since the CPUs in supercomputers (eg BlueGene) are pretty slow, but the communication between cores is very, very fast.

We've done a lot to develop algorithms for FAH-style internet connections between CPUs, but there are some calculations which require fast interconnects, and that's where the FAH/SMP client is particularly important. By allowing us to do calculations that we couldn't do otherwise, the science is pushed forward significantly (and we thus reward SMP donors with a points bonus due to this extra science done and the extra hassle involved in running the SMP client).

I guess it remains to be seen if we can pull off MPI on FAH to the point where it works effortlessly, but so far Lin and OSX look pretty good, so we're close. The A2 core should hopefully seal the deal. Now, the main task is getting Windows/SMP behaving well ...

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2008/07/index.html

hmmm the "the extra hassle involved in running the SMP client" comment makes me think this is not a set and forget run it on every spare office or layman pc users computer and that to me is a very practical consideration.