1. Some users may have multiple machines, even into the hundreds or thousands, under one account. You can add as many machines as you like under your username. When setting up BOINC, just use the user name and password that you used to sign in to the forum. It will take a couple of results for it to appear under your account so dont fret if you don't see it right away.

2. Correct. The only project that utilized GPU on World Community Grid to my recollection was HCC. Several other projects utilize GPUs, I believe you can search BOINC project page. Hopefully future WCG projects will utilize GPUs, but who knows what the researchers will do. Its all in their hands. If they do, I guess I'll have to actually get a decent card!

3. Not sure. I believe CUDA is more widely supported than OpenCL, but may be wrong. All I know is the latest NVIDIA cards (Maxwell and Pascal architectures) are beating the pants off AMD in certain areas of calculations.
EDIT - if you decide to do GPU computing, your 7970 is a good candidate. If you decide to upgrade, I would look into these cards. I put them in order of probable speed (and likely cost as well):
TitanX (Pascal architecture)
GTX 1080Ti (Pascal - release date Jan 2017 I believe)
GTX 1080 (Pascal)
GTX 1070 (Pascal)
TitanX (Maxwell)
GTX 1060 (Pascal)
GTX 980Ti (Maxwell )
GTX 980 (Maxwell)
GTX 1050/1050Ti (Pascal)
GTX 970 (Maxwell)
The Maxwell cards are the older generation, but you may be able to find them floating around for sale still. I prefer the Founders Edition cards, as they have one fan that blows the air across the card and out the rear of the case, rather than blowing it all around the inside of the case.

4. There may be more, but I focus solely on WCG. I remember reading that F@H would use GPUs though, so if you have a capable card, you could use CPU on WCG and GPU on F@H. Just make sure your computer has adequate power and cooling.

5. Correct. Unless the project is listed here on WCG, It won't count. It will count toward your BOINC stats, but Unless you are doing WCG work, it wont count for here.

On a side note, WCG also runs on Android (4.1 and higher I believe) so if you have any old devices that you want to set up as dedicated crunchers, just download BOINC from the play store, set up your WCG account, and optimize the preferences to your desire. NOTE: some devices will get very hot, so maybe positioning them in front of some air flow would help keep them cooler. Right now WCG has the Ebola and Zika projects running on Android as well as Windows/Linux/Mac.

Thanks for the rapid response joneill003. Just to follow-up on a few points.



Yeah, I was thinking it would be nice to use the 7970, but sounds like as you mentioned the researchers don't have anything on the hotplate yet.

I do agree on the founders edition for cooling, but I think for the perf / watt - the GTX1080 would be what I would pick. I would also buy a monitor with a rez higher than 1080p so the GTX1080 would make sense.



Yeah, if I really felt the need only for points, I have left here and gone to F@H. Only results I've seen there is research on how to make F@H results more effective, etc.. but nothing really on what the results have shown medically. And I did go to that F@H landing page recently too that showed their research. Here it makes more sense and research that I have interest in as it's specific.



Ah good to know. Thanks! :)



Yes good points Falconet. I did the upgrade on this machine via the Win10 upgrade, but I didn't install/uninstall the amd drivers although they are up to date. I heard that helps.

So you do 100% and then have it only run when idle? Default is 60% at all times.

Cheers to you both!

P.S. Where would I see the GPU in the BOINC manager as listed? What menu/option would it appear so I know it's recognized or not? Tkx

Let me add some additional data to this discussion. The WCG HCC project was OpenCL, for which AMD cards were optimized and Nvidia not so much. I seem to remember at the time WCG indicating that they would go with OpenCL instead of Cuda for future GPU projects in order to allow all members to participate and not just those with NVIDIA cards.

Edit: Undoing the changes my cat made prior to posting.

@joneilli
Yeah fair point on the 1070 as the true price per perf. I was thinking that the wattage is quite similar for the 2 and for me the price is secondary.

@deltavee
What else is required to make this work then - are there specific OpenGL drivers? I thought that games normally install that but perhaps I'm mistaken and BOINC requires something additional?

@Falconet
100% full throttle eh? :)

Yes, that's what I meant. The Crimson drivers are up to date - although windows initiates it, they are not windows drivers I was referring to. EDIT: I see what you mean. Yeah I was planning to do it myself... BUT... (see below) :)

So perhaps my GPU is active. On the taskbar, the BOINC icon mentions that "GPU inactive while in use", and I can also right click and snooze GPU. However in the advanced tab I see the GPU options in the Processor tab. So does it mean it's active?

AlmightyMoe,

Your 7970 GPU would be very good to use over at the Milkyway@home project. That project requires double precision cards and the 7970 is one of the most capable. I have an older 6950 using the AMD drivers that were installed by Windows 10 and it works quite well at Milkyway@home.