General Purpose GPU - Revision history

Jord: adding FAQ

2017-02-10T14:02:33Z

adding FAQ

Jord: adding BOINC versions

2017-02-10T13:55:28Z

adding BOINC versions

Jord: yeah, gonna end that another day

2017-02-10T00:00:46Z

yeah, gonna end that another day

New page

The General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, or GPGPU is the technical name for your [[Graphics Processing Unit | GPU]] when it's used to do OpenCL or CUDA calculations. Parts of the hardware inside the GPU can be used for rendering graphics, but also to do intricate calculations that would normally be done on the CPU. The speed increase of using the GPGPU comes because it's got several tens to thousands of rendering cores that are simultaneously used to do the calculations with.<br>
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A task from a project is split up in little chunks that all the processors in the GPU calculate in parallel.

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 The General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, or GPGPU is the technical name for your [[Graphics Processing Unit | GPU]] when it's used to do OpenCL or CUDA calculations. Parts of the hardware inside the GPU can be used for rendering graphics, but also to do intricate calculations that would normally be done on the CPU. The speed increase of using the GPGPU comes because it's got several tens to thousands of rendering cores that are simultaneously used to do the calculations with.<br>
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-A task from a project is split up in little chunks that all the processors in the GPU calculate in parallel.
+A task from a project is split up in little chunks that all the processors in the GPU calculate in parallel. Because of this, the processing speeds up tremendously. A task calculated on the GPU can be done in a fraction of the time it takes on the CPU. A task that takes multiple hours on the CPU can be run in just half an hour on a present day last generation Nvidia GTX 1080 or AMD RX 480 GPU, depending on project and data of course.<br>
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+Not all projects are capable of using the GPU though, be it because their (proprietary) code can't be translated to OpenCL yet, or because their data is too big to be run on a GPU. Which is why a project such as ClimatePrediction.net still uses the CPU.<br>
 BOINC 6.4.5 had the first CUDA on Nvidia GPUs.<br>
 BOINC 6.10.35 had [[ATI CAL]] support.<br>
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 BOINC 7.2.20 had OpenCL support for Intel and AMD CPUs.<br>
 BOINC 7.4.9 had OpenCL support for devices other than Intel, Nvidia or AMD GPUs and CPUs (e.g. Android).<br>

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:55, 10 February 2017
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	A task from a project is split up in little chunks that all the processors in the GPU calculate in parallel.		A task from a project is split up in little chunks that all the processors in the GPU calculate in parallel.
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		+	BOINC 6.4.5 had the first CUDA on Nvidia GPUs.<br>
		+	BOINC 6.10.35 had [[ATI CAL]] support.<br>
		+	BOINC 7.0.28 had [[OpenCL]] support for AMD/ATI GPUs and Nvidia GPUs.<br>
		+	BOINC 7.0.42 had OpenCL support on Intel HD Graphics 2500 and 4000 GPUs (built into Ivy Bridge iCore type CPUs).<br>
		+	BOINC 7.2.20 had OpenCL support for Intel and AMD CPUs.<br>
		+	BOINC 7.4.9 had OpenCL support for devices other than Intel, Nvidia or AMD GPUs and CPUs (e.g. Android).<br>