Brief explanation please

[npaizis]

At the risk of sounding stupid, can someone give me an explanation as to what GPU processing is all about? What hardware is required?

I have an Intel Q9300 on which I am running 4 instances of Seti.

The graphics are ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

If this is sufficient, how do I proceed?

Nick

[Mach]

As far as I know, CUDA is only available on nVIDIA GPUs

[npaizis]

I forgot to mention I have another system with an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

[Josef W. Segur]

I forgot to mention I have another system with an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

Host 4288363, it seems. Core 2 Duo E6750 running Win Vista 32 bit and recently updated to BOINC 6.4.5.

CUDA is Nvidia's proprietary software system for using the GPU for general purpose calculations, and they worked with the project to make a port of the S@H application. Your 8500 GT can run that code, it also uses only a small fraction of the CPU power so other work can be done by the CPUs. In effect you gain another processing core, though my guess is the 8500 may not be as productive as the cores in the E6750.
                                                                        Joe

[npaizis]

Thanks Joe, I appreciate the courtesy of a reply.

I'm getting a better picture now and realize CUDA is Nvidia only. I have it running now and will give it a few days to see how it stacks up against my native C2D. I understand the C2D can also process AstroPulse units while CUDA is running. I haven't figured out how to do this yet but I'll keep trying.

Thanks.