GPU core progress

We've been making some significant progress with the GPU core recently.  We've had a switch of personnel: Vishal graduated, and Mark Friedrichs (professional programming staff) & Adam Beberg (CS graduate student) have joined the GPU core team.  They've made significant new progress.  Mark has been porting some of the new science code from the PS3 client to the the GPU client.  Adam has been streamlining the development process (which is still quite messy for GPU's) as well as hunting down several bugs.  We've also recently been getting a lot of help from  GPU companies (more info on that in another post) and that has been a HUGE help to us.

Our hope is to get the GPU client back up to speed science-wise, giving results comparable to the PS3 client (and perhaps even a few more advanced features than the PS3 has).  Also, we're really pushing support for other graphics cards beyond what we support now.  This has been the tricky part, but Adam and our collaborators have made huge strides forward here.

Comments

[Warren Marts]

So very glad to hear about extended card/GPU support. I have some idea of how difficult writing 'portable' GPU code must be, given you probably have to have to deal with some kind of a shader compiler built into the OEM's DirectX driver.

Can we hear about any progress for supporting Brand "N" in addition to Brand "A"? NVidia has been making lots of noise about their GPGPU dev efforts.

[Mike N]

Great to hear, I just bought a Radeon HD 2900 Pro and am looking forward to folding on it!

[Shawn]

I just updated form the beta5 to beta6 GPU client and am now experiencing a lot of trouble. Every time I shut down the client, it loses its progress and re-downloads a new work packet.

Also, the beta6 client crashes if I use the links underneath the Status menu.

I am writing these things here as your forums will not work for me. It may be a browser-specific bug (I use Firefox). Basically, the forums will not load until I refresh several (as many as forty) times, and then they do not allow me to register so that I can post, saying that I have already registered. I have not registered before, though, and have no confirmation email or anything stating that any of my failed attempts actually got through.