The CUDA application for 32 bit Windows has been deployed on BOINC. In terms of hardware a NVIDIA GPU supporting Compute Capability 1.3 is required. The following GPUs: GeForce GTX 295, 285, 280, 260, Tesla S1070, C1060, Quadro Plex 2200 D2, Quadro FX 5800, 4800 are known to have CUDA 1.3 support. The GPUs also need to have 256 MB of Video RAM and NVIDIA Driver 190.xx or higher needs to be installed. If these prerequisites are not met the CUDA application will not be downloaded through BOINC.

A new preference has been added to the Milkyway@Home preferences page that specifies whether the project is allowed to use your GPU for computation, this has to be enabled in order to receive work from the CUDA application. This preference does not affect the anonymous plan class used by the ATI application.

While the CUDA application is running there will be a slowdown in the responsiveness of the user interface of the operating system, more specifically the explorer.exe process will use a lot of CPU. This is because the GPU is performing computations therefore it does not have a lot of free time to update the user interface, therefore the CPU has to do more work. There is a preference in BOINC to only use the GPU when the computer is idle.

If computation errors are being generated by the CUDA application please reference the results and the error message so the problem can be diagnosed. With the tremendous amount of variety in products, drivers, and operating systems it is high unlikely for everything to go smoothly these first few weeks, the Milkyway@Home team sincerely appreciates your patience in reaching this milestone and we look forward to your feedback.

This has been successfully tested on Windows XP x64 Professional Edition, BOINC 6.6.36 (32 bit), NVIDIA Drivers 190.62 (64 bit), and with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 that was generously donated from NVIDIA to the Milkway@Home research team.