It is often suggested that, to practically participate in mining, one must obtain a graphics card and install CUDA and/or OpenCL libraries.
From their wikipeda definitions:
CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming
interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It allows software
developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics
processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach
termed GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).
The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the
GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for
the execution of compute kernels.Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a framework for writing programs
that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central
processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital
signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and
other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies
programming languages (based on C99 and C++11) for programming these
devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the
platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides
a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based
parallelism.
How and why are CUDA and OpenCL used in PoW Mining?
How much, if at all, does the Ethereum platform depend on these?
What are the alternatives?
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