1) Message boards : Number crunching : Total processing power? (Message 17515)
Posted 5047 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
Ticking over with a GTX260 isn't bad!

Perhaps a GTX460 will tempt you in the future, should it turn up with a 150W TDP and at a fair price?

I don't pay that much attention to the power draw, it is more of a side note with me.... but when I compare performance across platforms it is one factor to consider. My upgrade path of choice would be to get an i7 980(+) with at least a 3 PCI-e MB with more than 6G of memory and a SSD ... I was looking at a bare bones Tiger DIrect system that actually had a pair of Nvidia 4xx cards with it... my preferred choice would be to put a pair of 5870s in the new system and then perhaps one of the 4xx cards... that would make my "smallest" system one with an i7 920 and a pair of 4870s ...
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Total processing power? (Message 17497)
Posted 5048 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
Another few reasons why GPUGrid has such small numbers,
Paul runs his GTX260 on Win 7.
Paul does not drive his GTX295 carefully.
Paul went out and bought ATI cards!
So basically it’s all Pauls fault :P

- The GTX260 card has not had an error in quite a few tasks.
- I stopped using the GTX295 here because it was throwing errors/driver halts while running a couple projects
- Guilty
- Guilty ...

Then again, one of the reasons I got the first card was because the magicians behind the scenes suggested that an ATI application was on the horizon ... note that I am still holding my breath ...

Oh, as to the migration to Win7, I decided to try it because I did have a copy from a sale of VIsta and I wanted to see if the 64 bit version was worth the bother (XP-64 certainly was not when I tried it)... it was, and everything work right out of the box and so I converted over ... now I have more memory on all my systems (almost 3G on three of them) and the advantage of running 64-bit science applications on those projects that have them (ABC, PG, etc.) to gain a slight bit of speed on the CPU side...

Still, I used to be #13 here ... so I guess it truly is all my fault ... :)
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Total processing power? (Message 17490)
Posted 5049 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
A few of reasons that the project has such low numbers ...

1) No ATI application... I have been moving to ATI because of cost and power draw of Nvidia cards as well as reliablility and availability ... so, instead of having 7 cards working on GPU Grid I am down to one and it shares with other CUDA projects (as before)... as soon as the ATI application comes out, I am sure that the numbers will spike up...

2) No CPU application, for many practical reasons including the time it would take to do a model...

3) The time it takes to do a model anyway ... :)

This is a resource intense project and some don't like the "cost" in time to run the models ... so the run elsewhere...

4) GPU Computing is still in its infancy ... there are really not that many people doing BOINC in the first place (about 350,00 is all) and there are not that many people with GPUs ... still ... GPUs are pretty expensive as far as most folks are concerned ... so, few can afford the mid to higher end cards that are needed here ...

{edit}
Yes you can compare it to a super-computer ... but the comparison is more apt when you compare the totality of what is being done on BOINC to that theoretical Super-Computer... All projects, all users, all hosts ...
4) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU Needed? (Message 17487)
Posted 5049 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
Continuing that thought, this is also partly a design decision of UCB wherein the "desire" of the multi-CPU project for all available resources will override the rule of no idle resources. Until all the running applications have check-pointed more and more resources will be idled until the MP task can be started.

As Alain noted, this issue was supposed to be addressed to make the effect minimal so, yes, reporting it on Aqua and the development boards is indicated if it is still occurring with the later generations of the BOINC and Aqua applications ...
5) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU Needed? (Message 17460)
Posted 5051 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
imho... I would not suggest adding more than 2 projects to a box, since it gets interesting on how boinc schedules projects/etc.


2 CPU projects is fine. It may not be optimal all the time (as Paul would argue) but it usually gets the job done without wierd stuff happening. And you get the benefit of not running dry if one project fails.

Running only two project not optimal? Or BOINC not running optimally?

I have no complaint about the first thought ... in fact I recommend at least two projects... Those that are super-adicted to SaH for instance these last couple of weeks have been having a really tough go of it as the project is having one of its rough patches... that is why I suggested WCG with an alternative of Rosetta as they are both projects that concentrate on the disease area and both have decent up-times and reliable flows of work ...

The second way of reading your assertion is correct in that I do argue that after 5 years of development BOINC does not serve the user communities well, not the single project fanatics, nor the reasonable 5-10 project group, and least of all the oddballs that run them all (only about 3,000 of us)... what makes this so astounding is that Dr. Anderson wrote a paper on this aspect, but his actions are of those of a man that has never read the very paper he wrote ... very strange ...
6) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU Needed? (Message 17431)
Posted 5052 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
So if I understand correctly, then:

1) four CPU cores + 1 GPU core = five tasks being executed in parallel (assuming 100% CPU availability, and connection to WCG and CPUGRID)
2) I should put RS to 100 for both to achieve #1

Is that right?

[Edit] read those posts again and it looks right. Cheers dudes.

Now, can anyone recommend a low-end (on the cheap, $50 or less) GPU card to wet my feet? :D

That would be correct... 5 tasks, one on the GPU and 4 on the CPU ... With only one CPU project and one GPU project the machine would, in theory, always be working on the tasks from the appropriate projects. You *MAY* want to consider setting up a back-up project for each "side" so that the system will not go idle ... but you may also want to leave that for another day ... when the feet are a little more wet. WCG is a good project in that they do have a fantastic up-time and almost always have work of one sort or another on a variety of sub-projects ... the only way they suck from a user's perspective is that they are one of the lower paying projects ... if that becomes of interest ...

As to RS, with just WCG and GPU Grid (or the other projects as GPU only selections (Note: for Collatz you would have to change the on-lline settings to not send you any CPU side work as I have done)) the RS can be left to 100 as it will not matter. If you add additional projects on either "side" you will have to decide on what you want ... if you connect to WCG, GPU Grid and Rosetta at RS 100 the GPU will be full time on GPU Grid and the CPUs will run about 50/50 WCG and Rosetta tasks ...

I think they may still be a bit pricy for you but the 9800GT is a fair card though in my opinion barely adequate for GPU Grid (as would be the GT240)... GPU Grid is not that "friendly" to the lower end cards because of the heft of the computation task... my personal recommendation would be to consider Collatz to start with a low end card (or DNETC)... if you are too low end of a card you will not be able to consider MW due to the need for double precision ...
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Current release BOINC version is 6.10.56 (Message 17406)
Posted 5053 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
And v6.10.57 has been released as the next test version.

Not sure enough changed from 6.10.56 to make it worth the trouble of trying ... a minor cosmetic bug that was fixed in the baseline code did not look like it was picked up for example ... the change set was made, but not included ...

Back to bad change management ... sigh ...
8) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Get a better card! (Message 17405)
Posted 5053 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
That's what v6.07 is telling me, on my 9800 GTX+.

That's fummy, it was perfectly acceptable with v6.05 just a couple of days ago. If this "better supports cards with little memory" (from the news thread), I think you should ask for your money back.

Or you could get a getter card... :)
9) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU Needed? (Message 17404)
Posted 5053 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
Yep, already figured that out. Next question: if I have two processers (not that GPU Grid uses even one), and I put this and another CPU-heavy project on 100% resource share each (equal resource share), both will run at the same time right? Or will BOINC timeshare? :(

There's really no point to timeshare, since they use different crunching resources. I want to figure this out before I buy my GPU card.

GPU projects for the most part have minimal load on the CPU side (Einstein is one exception) so that running GPU Grid, Collatz, MW, etc, have minimal to no impact on running projects like WCG. If you run WCG at RS 100 and GPU Grid at RS 100 both should run full time (work being available of course), if you run Rosetta, WCG, and GPU Grid at the same RS then you will spend about half the CPU time doing RaH tasks and half doing WCG tasks ... OVER TIME ... that means that you can and **WILL** have instances where two RaH tasks run or two WCG tasks run at the same time ... add in more projects and it gets more interesting ...

I am at the far end of the spectrum in that I attach to pretty much every project and donate time to them ... sometimes I have used unbalanced RS to allocate the time based on how much I like project A over B and at other times have done other things ...

Last point, the actual RS numbers themselves have no meaning ... it is the ratio of the numbers and the number of projects that have that RS number that is meaningful ... so, if I am allocating based on interest I would set the most interesting projects to 100, less interesting to 50, 25, or 10... but, even 10 RS projects on fast and wide (8 core or more) systems have a chance to be run once a day... Though not properly shown in BOINC Manager, the RS is actually split along resource types (ATI, CUDA, CPU, etc.) so ... in my system with an ATI card and a CUDA card it can get interesting ... :)
10) Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Awful lot of xxx__cuda.exe has stopped working (Message 17338)
Posted 5055 days ago by Profile Paul D. Buck
It seems (in my opinion) to be bugs with the app rather than the hardware or driver. Hopefully the guys can track it down and fix it, Gets rather annoying having all the tasks fail and the popups every time.

It is why I stopped running GPU Grid on the GTX295 card ... running all MW on it now ... only run GPU Grid on the GTX260 which still seems to run the tasks just fine ...


Next 10
//