World Community Grid - View Thread - Mandatory "Request for Project to be Ported to GPU" Thread

Of course a GPU is capable of executing a task much faster than a CPU, but despite this the CPU remains and will remain more flexible .... Especially with the multiplication of cores and with the addition of new instructions. Folding@home is a perfect example of this fact. Despite the fact that this project is very popular on GPUs, there is a huge contribution from CPUs, with a performance gap that gets smaller with large multi-core CPUs .... With reasonable consumption.

The same processes that drive the advances in CPU's also drive the advances in GPU's. However, we are very close to the end of the line for Moore's Law.

For BOINC and WCG, it is a simple case of using the right tool for the job. In over half a century of Moore's Law no one has come up with a replacement for the CPU. On the other hand, there have been a lot of specialized processors designed to do specific tasks better and faster than the average CPU of the time could. While I doubt any one of them was perfect they were worth the cost in money, materials, and time because they were the best tools for the jobs. From Vector Processors to ASIC's to GPU's to FPGA's, they are all just tools.

They question the scientists are asking now is "What are the most powerful and most common tools we can leverage?" The answers are CPU's and GPU's because almost everyone has both of these items in their toolbox. That makes it worth the money, materials, and time to re-code their software.

Time is the most important factor. It's the one thing we can never get more of. This isn't a change for the sake of change. It's an investment in the scientific method and the future of humanity.