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BOINC Now Available For GPU/CUDA
GDI Lord writes "BOINC, open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing, has posted news that GPU computing has arrived! The GPUGRID.net project from the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park uses CUDA-capable NVIDIA chips to create an infrastructure for biomolecular simulations. (Currently available for Linux64; other platforms to follow soon. To participate, follow the instructions on the web site.) I think this is great news, as GPUs have shown amazing potential for parallel computing."
As someone who is interested in software neural nets, this announcement practically gives me a chubber.
And let me be the first to welcome our new Distributed Overlord. The lack of an 's' on "Overlord" is the exciting part of this article.
The only sad thing is that CUDA is a single platform API that only supports a handful of cards from a single constructor. For a project that tries to get as many computers working together as possible like BOINC, it would be also good if they tried to support at least one more API.
Brook could have been also a nice candidate. It has already been used by other distributed computing project (Folding@home), it supports multiple back-end (including a multi-CPU one which actually works(*), an OpenGL which works with most hardware, and AMD/ATI's CAL backend featured in their Brook+ fork)
Too bad that currently both nVidia and Intel are trying to attract customers to proprietary single platform APIs (CUDA and Ct resp.)
Specially given some memory management weirdness in CUDA.
(*) : unlike CUDA's device emulation mode which is just a ridiculous joke performance-wise.
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