I ask this because my concern has been the new SETI Enhanced version 5.12 has this work unit that is taking like over 4 hours on my 3.06 GHz P4 compared to the previous on average ~ 2.5 hours. That is a first in terms of time taken.

I have a 6600GT PCI-E 128 MB video graphics card. Will it offer an advantage over the CPU to be used for number crunching? If so, is there some upcoming software that can take advantage of this and uses the GPU to help to speed up the work units?

Thank you for responding.

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It has been discussed many times on most of the Projects, including Seti, and the concensus seems to be that it will probably be of little benefit. And the resources are just not available to do it for all the different graphics cards available, plus the major manufacturers cards work in completely different ways.

Just one more thing the enhanced units take differing times to crunch based on the angle_range of the unit. In future you will probably get some units that are shorter than the old units.
See number crunching post by Ingleside for details. Seti enhanced deadlines
Andy

GPUs do not do the precision math as well as the FPU. Yes, they are fast but they lose accuracy needed in these calculations. If a pixel is off color, it will not bother the game, but if that same error was in the calculation of a result, you'd probably get an invalid result.

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Never say never. A recent PC PRO had an article where custom software was written so a graphics card can do DB maths. A GeForce6800/ATI x800 can do DB maths 10 X quicker than the CPU.
I'm sure there are many technical difficulties to get it working for Boinc but it is a large untapped resource.

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I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they pass.

Snowcrash: I suppose people who run DB math don't need nearly the high precision as SETI uses in it's algorithms to search for ET. Quite a big difference there if you ask me.

There's just too many problems with the idea. Not everyone owns a high end graphics card. Supporting each GPU's instruction set. Needing high 80bit precision vs. GPU's 32bit precision. The slowdown it takes in getting data over the graphics bus vs. the CPU's FSB. The slowdown it would take to force a 32bit FPU in a GPU to match the 80bit FPU in a CPU.

Bottom line, it has already been tried by the people who offer optimized crunchers for SETI, and the performance wasn't all that great. Perhaps, if/when the performance delta and other issues get resolved there might be a way to utilize the GPU, but for now, it just doesn't cut it.

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Hello,

and what'up about the PPU (physic processor unit)?

and what'up about the PPU (physic processor unit)?

See this thread for info on the PPU.

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Folding@Home has been compatible with the latest ATI cards for a few months now. Now that Nvidia has answered the call with their unified cards (and provided an SDK to allow creation of applications to utilize GPU processing) there will hopefully be a SETI@Home client created.

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