I am taking a parallel computing course at my university and we are supposed to do a semester long project on anything related to the course material. I have decided that I wanted to do something with Bitcoin or cryptos.

My idea is to fork the current Bitcoin Core wallet. The fork will have a feature to verify the blockchain on a local GPU to offload the work of verifying blocks on the CPU. This is what miners do, though they are trying to find the hashes, I wish to verify.

This idea came about after watching my CPU sit at 100% for a few hours after doing a fresh install of the Core wallet on a new desktop and waiting for the blockchain to verify.

My questions,

So I want to know if this is a feasible idea, from everything I know it is, but I haven't dug into the code yet at all?

Would this be useful? I would assume as long as the chain is being downloaded fast enough to provide the GPU with work it would be. I think for testing I will just copy a blockchain data file to a new Core wallet install and see if my software or the original verifies faster to prove the idea.  

Any general ideas or concerns?

EDIT: I had another idea. I think it would be a lot easier to just write a standalone chain verifier... Give it a file path of the chain you want verified, set some GPU parameters, and let it rip through it.