I have searched all over and can't find a single project that supports ATI for Mac. I don't really care which it is, but if anyone could please confirm this or let me know of one that I may have missed I'd be very grateful. I have an iMac with ATI Radeon HD 5750 and I have been able to get it recognized in bootcamp/Windows 7 but I would like to run something GPU wise on the Mac partition. Does anyone know of anything that will let me do that?

Thanks

http://boincfaq.mundayweb.com/index.php?language=1&view=471

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Yeah, I've seen that. Not only is it a year old, created in 2008, modified in Jan of 2010; but in the only part that really talks about macs it talks about CUDA. It does go on to mention stuff about ATI/CAL but it appears to be a reference to Windows only. There's no mention of any directions for getting BOINC to find the Mac ATI GPU. The only beacon of hope is that list near the beginning that has two ** next to it for Milkyway@home and says Macintosh GPU apps available. They may very well be (although I can find no other confirmation) but it doesn't do me much good without my ATI GPU being recognized by BOINC; maybe they use some other optimized app?.

but it doesn't do me much good without my ATI GPU being recognized by BOINC

You have this as a first problem then. What's your original OS?
Did you install all the correct (ATI APP) drivers or install the ATI SDK?

The biggest problem which all projects have is that Nvidia may want to lend a hand at porting over their science applications to run on CUDA; getting ATI/AMD to do the same is nearly impossible. They say, "you want it ported? Here's all our minimalistic documentation on it, here are the programs, the white papers. Now leave us alone, we're too busy with ourselves. Do not ask for help, we'll ignore you all the way."

So for projects to have to make an ATI app, they have to figure this out all for themselves, for all three main platforms. This costs time and money, two things they do not necessarily want to spend on trying to figure this one out.

For some projects 3rd party programmers are busy (mostly in their own time, without help from the project even, without being paid!!) trying to figure it all out. Since Windows is notoriously the easiest to program for, they use this mainly as their test-bed. Linux and OS X to follow later on.

Not only is it a year old, created in 2008, modified in Jan of 2010

I know my FAQ is outdated, but even if I add to it today, it'll be outdated tomorrow. So it's being rewritten, in another place. Eventually, I hope it'll find its way out there. I'd like to see anyone write things for his favorite program every single day, without letup. I just need my time away from everything at times. There are 10+ other people with access to the FAQs and I seem to be the only one writing and updating them... oh well.

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You are right. My problem is two fold. One since that post is old, I wanted to see if anyone could confirm that there still are Mac ATI apps for Milkyway@home, or anything else for that matter. Upon confirmation, if those projects took the time to make apps for them then surely there must be a way to get the ATI cards seen by BOINC or some other program. I did read your post in this thread :https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=6102 which sounds like the same stuff you said here. It is a shame about ATI and they're lack of support for science projects. This guy is asking somewhat the same question as me and someone else gave him you FAQ. He apparently found the files but just didn't know where they go. I'm a step behind him in even finding the files. I'm perfectly willing (we'll find out if I'm capable) to try to put the files in the right place, I just can't find them. Do you happen to know where he went to on your FAQ to even get them? I don't have any Mac ATI drivers or SDK installed. I had to do that on the Windows side of my iMac, and it was easy. I'm concerned so much with the difficulty of doing it on the mac, as this other guy was, just can't find any drives at all. So yeah, 1. confirmation that those apps are still out there and I'm not wasting my time, and 2. does your FAQ have a link to ATI drives for the mac, b/c I didn't see one.

Prime Gride in their beta/future projects section has a post on beta testing their ATI Open CL for mac OS science app. I would also look at the beta/opti apps section on collatz. I have talked to the Lattice project admin he has had test runs for windows of the Open CL science app. He hopes on the next round of beta testing to have linux/OSX version of the Open CL science app. the Lattice project is to have the GPU science app to be Open CL for all platforms. I don't know the status of the ATI Open CL support of the ATI Mac OS drivers ( I only have a Nvidia GPU at the moment). I would PM/email/ talk to projects you like about their future plans.

PrimeGrid looks to be the project which will soonest integrate ATi OpenCL support for Macs given they are making huge strides as far as porting more of their sub-projects to GPU right now.

They're all CUDA right now, which will run on Mac (if you have a laptop, that is).

As far as I know, ATi apps are under development to run on OS X for PrimeGrid and MilkyWay. MW already has ATi apps for Windows/Linux, so I suppose the next step is modifying bits of code to run under OS X.

With GPU computing so much in the spotlight, the real challenge is finding developers. The one who made the PrimeGrid ATi application for Windows actually did not own an ATi card and therefore couldn't even test it (for example).

Someone did mention how difficult it is to port things to CAL/Brook or even OpenCL as opposed to CUDA...I agree. We've developed another fully functional CUDA app over at PrimeGrid in under a week...it's not yet on BOINC, but it will be, and for some reason I guarantee no ATi app could come about that fast.

You could use a VM...but that kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it. ;)

I'm a Mac guy too, so believe me I'd love to see that, or perhaps a Mac Pro with a GTX 580 SLI setup. But if you think ATi is hard to communicate with, imagine suggesting that to Apple...

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