Graphics Processing Unit

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The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit on your videocard is a piece of electronica that is designed to translate visual data into everything you see on the monitor of your computer. For a very in-depth and technical explanation, I gladly point you to the Wikipedia article on the same subject. For when you have a couple of hours to kill.

Up till BOINC 6.2 the GPU was only used for showing of the screen saver, it was BOINC 6.4 that brought us the first steps into using the GPGPU and use the Nvidia Geforce GTX 8800 to do CUDA calculations at Seti@Home. Developers from Nvidia helped the developers of BOINC and Seti to port over the CPU application and get most of the bugs out. A couple of us briefed the developers on the bugs found by the public. It was fun & hectic times there in November-December 2008.

BOINC 6.4.5 was the first public released version, quickly followed by a version 6.6 with lots more bug fixes.
BOINC 6.10.35 saw ATI CAL support.
BOINC 7.0.28 came with OpenCL support for AMD/ATI GPUs and Nvidia GPUs.
BOINC 7.0.42 started OpenCL support on Intel HD Graphics 2500 and 4000 GPUs (built into Ivy Bridge iCore type CPUs).
BOINC X came with OpenCL support for Intel and AMD CPUs.