Public BOINC 6.4.5 released for Windows and Linux

Rom Walton wrote:

We are pleased to announce that BOINC 6.4.5 is ready for public use.

This release adds the ability for the client to use your Nvidia based graphic card(s) to process work.

Download: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php
Release Notes: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Release_Notes
Version History: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VersionHistory (or this thread)

Thanks to all the testers who made this release possible.

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team

So where's the Macintosh client?
Charlie Fenton wrote:

we have no plans to release 6.4 for the Macintosh at this time, because we can't run BOINC CUDA applications on the Mac until NVIDIA makes some changes in their Mac software.

Problems and bugs still in 6.4:

- Cannot install on Domain Controllers.
- Work fetch is bugged. It can happen that one or more cores go dry on work. A fix for this is forthcoming in 6.6
- Other open tickets shown here. (Trac, may need registration and to be logged in to be able to follow the link)

So where's the Macintosh client? - Part II.

Just to clarify the decision not to release a BOINC 6.4 with CUDA for the Macintosh, in more detail.

Charlie Fenton wrote:

When an application has multiple architectures, the Mac OS automatically selects the appropriate one to run. The BOINC client for the Mac has executables for 3 architectures in a single file: PowerPC, 32-bit Intel and 64-bit Intel. Except on a small percentage of Intel Macs (older ones which were built before the Intel Core 2 Duo, and ones using the older OS 10.4) the client runs as a 64-bit executable.

The BOINC client attempts to link dynamically with the NVIDIA CUDA libraries, and if that succeeds it calls into the libraries to determine the type of GPU. But NVIDIA's library only has the 32-bit versions, which the 64-bit BOINC client can't link with. (Of course, the 64-bit client can launch both 64-bit and 32 bit project applications.)

The older Intel Macs, which run the 32-bit client, actually should be able to run the CUDA applications using BOINC 6.5, but of course there are no applications available yet.

There are ways to work around this, but they all add complications. Since NVIDIA has promised to add the 64-bit Mac libraries fairly soon, we've decided to wait for that.