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11)
Message boards :
Graphics cards (GPUs) :
Tesla K40 & System Upgrade?
(Message 35655)
Posted 3697 days ago by Dagorath I checked out the Asus mobo you're considering and I have 3 thoughts on it. 1) It's an LGA 2011 socket board which means your i7-4770 won't fit onto it as it's an LGA 1150 CPU. So you'll need a new CPU too. 2) It doesn't have an additional +12V power connector as does the Gigabyte board I mentioned in my previous post. You might get away without that extra connector if you run only 3 GTX 770 cards but you might not. I mentioned the consequences in my previous post. You did mention you doubt you can go more than 3 cards but if you should decide to go for 4 or if you decide to go for 3 GTX 780Ti then you need that extra connector. 3) I didn't check prices at Australian outlets but at my favorite Canadian retailer the Asus board costs more than the Gigabyte model I mentioned in my previous post. The Asus board doesn't have everything you need; the Gigabyte board has everything you need and more. It will accommodate 4 cards if you decide to go for 4 in the future and I have a hunch you will want to, it's not that difficult. I think your question on SLI was answered by 2 other responders already. |
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Message boards :
News :
"Power To Give" - volunteer distributed computing for smartphones
(Message 35652)
Posted 3697 days ago by Dagorath I dunno, it seems smart enough to me. I think the battery lasts a week because I rarely turn it on. I turn it on when I need to make a call and when the call is over I turn it off. See I have the thing as a convenience for me not as a convenience for other people. If they want to talk to me they can leave a voicemail and I'll get back to them if and when I feel like it. Otherwise they can email me. I'm hearing impaired, don't like talking to people unless they talk really loud or I can read their lips. Email is better. |
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13)
Message boards :
Graphics cards (GPUs) :
Tesla K40 & System Upgrade?
(Message 35644)
Posted 3698 days ago by Dagorath I doubt the K40 will give you the performance you expect here. IIRC, it's a pro-level card that's great at double-precision floating point (DPFP) maths. This project needs only single-precision floating point not DPFP so consumer level cards targeted at gamers are all you need. Some mof the more experienced users here can elaborate on that. Also, I recall something about SLI causing problems but that might apply only to Linux? Or maybe NVIDIA fixed that a while back with a driver upgrade? You don't need to put $5K into another system. I have less than $2K into mine and I think it might be close to what you're looking for. I'm trying to cram 4 cards onto 1 mobo too so I can speak to the many issues you'll encounter with that. They are: 1 Limits on current (amps) through the PCI bus and 24-pin connector Only the better (say more expensive) mobos can handle the current that 4 cards will draw on the mobo. If you don't get the right mobo it will fry and possibly (probably?) take 1 or more cards with it. You definitely want a mobo that has an additional +12V connector and is designed to carry the load. After advice from the gurus here I chose the GA-Z87X-OC Force and I think it was an excellent choice but there are cooling issues you need to consider. The OC Peg feature on the GA-Z87X-OC Force or something similar on other brands is something you cannot live without if you want 4 cards on 1 mobo. It was a $419 CDN purchase from Newegg but I was lucky and got a $100 manufacturer's rebate. Would be worth it even at $419. I have it up and running with 2 GTX 670 and a GTX 660Ti at the moment and have a 4th card arriving soon to fill the 4th slot. It is a marvelous board!! 2 Cooling Read this thoroughly and carefully. With 4 cards on 1 board they are so close together they partially block each other's fans plus, even worse, certain models blow their hot air directly into the fan intakes of the card beside it. Those models are usually OC models and you list of components states you have 2 of them. They will cause a problem for you and I know because 1 of mine is an OC model too. Fortunately there are a number of solutions for this and other issues but you definitely want to know and understand all the issues and options before you make any move. 2.1 OC not desirable for 2 reasons OC cards are great for gaming but not for crunching. They produce errors that you don't notice in games but those errors cause BOINC tasks to fail. In the end a lot of users end up down clocking their card or carefully tuning voltage and clocks but it seems the voltage and clock settings that work for 1 type of task don't necessarily work for another type of task. There are at least 3 different types of tasks being issued at this project at any given time and you cannot select which ones you receive so that solution is not an option. The easiest solution is install non-OC cards, for 2 reasons. Non-OC cards almost always have axial fans and a design that blows the hot air out the rear of the case rather than into the fan intake of the card beside it. That tends to reduce ambient case temperature as well as the temps of individual cards, the CPU and other components. I consider radial fans a must in a 4 card host. It's either radial fans or liquid cooling. IMHO, liquid cooling is a huge expense and it creates as many issues at it solves. And it's totally unnecessary if you can keep the case temp and intake air temp down. Read that again and know that if you ignore that point your cards will operate above the desirable 70 Celsius mark at which cards seem to downclock themselves. There are plenty of ways to stay below 70 C mark. I'm using a combination of ducts, very high volume fans and pulling cold air in from outdoors and exhausting the hot air to the outdoors. If I were to spill the hot exhaust into the room and draw room air back into the case it absolutely would not work without cooling the room with air conditioning. 2.2 Axial fans too close together As mentioned above, 4 cards on 1 board have very little space between them and airflow into the fan intakes is restricted. At this point in time I am just staying below the 70C mark but with summer coming on and outdoor temps going from below 0 to well above 0 I'm going to have to either run the fans on the cards considerably faster or modify them extensively. The third alternative is to add a small AC unit in front of the case intake but I want to avoid that expense. The problem with increasing the card fan speed is that they are already at 80% and that's the maximum the BIOS on the cards allows. I think I might have re-programmed the BIOS on one of the cards to allow 95% but I'm not sure. It definitely will run at 95% but due to some confusion as to which card I was actually re-programming, I'm not sure whether I increased the max speed or the card was manufactured with a 95% limit. Regardless, I plan to remove the 4 existing fans on the cards and replace them with 1 high volume fan that pushes air into all 4 cards. It will take some custom duct but I prefer that to running the fans faster. They're radial fans and radial fans are inherently noisy. They're hydraulic bearing fans so no worries about them wearing out, it's just a noise issue. 3 Alternatives Prior to purchasing the GA-Z87X-OC Force I was considering going with 4 ITX boards ( mini ATX boards). I think I'm going to try that before purchasing another GA-Z87X-OC Force board for the simple reason that I could easily arrange them inside a custom case in a geometry that would prevent any of the 4 cards from stifling airflow into the other cards or blow hot air directly into the other cards. There are concerns that none of the ITX boards on the market can supply the current a high end card requires but nobody has specs to prove it. So I intend to experiment and prove it one way or another. You might consider it too but be forewarned that not just any old ITX board will suffice. Tread very carefully if you go this route. 4 Summary Plenty of options. Which one(s) work for you depends on what you can do with a screwdriver, a drill, tin snips and a saw. The only limits are your imagination, ambition/time and disposable income. |
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Message boards :
News :
"Power To Give" - volunteer distributed computing for smartphones
(Message 35639)
Posted 3698 days ago by Dagorath OK, I'm in which means I'll give it a try but as someone else said... task sizes and deadlines are going to have to be tailored to the usage pattern of crunching only while charging. I don't use my cell phone much and find I need to charge it only once per week. I'll try to remember to charge nightly but that might not happen so it might take me a month to return a result. If it doesn't work for me I'll just chalk it up to the fact that some things aren't suitable for everybody but I hope project admins are extremely lenient with deadlines else I fear it's not going to work for a lot of people. If it does work as simple and easy as they make it sound then with HTC and Samsung pushing it, this could be the biggest free BOINC promo to date. It might even encourage people who have never heard of BOINC to install BOINC on their desktops. How's this going to work on Apple gear? Will they make users download tasks from iTasks at a cost of $1.50 per task? Will iHeads pay and tout it as another benefit of owning an iPhone that you can't get on any other brand? |
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15)
Message boards :
News :
"Power To Give" - volunteer distributed computing for smartphones
(Message 35630)
Posted 3698 days ago by Dagorath The Crunch on Your Smartphone Usage Model: 1) tweet about how you're doing BOINC on your phone and it's the coolest thing ever 2) update Facebook page about how you just tweeted about doing the coolest thing ever 3) put phone in pocket and leave for work 4) notice phone in pocket is HOT 5) get to work, take out phone to update Facebook page you just arrived at work and discover phone is now cold..... because battery is dead 6) use work computer to update Facebook page that your phone battery is dead and you're recharging it now 7) repeat 6) 10 more times before you get home from work 8) repeat 1) through 7) until you realize it's impossible to crunch unless the phone is constantly on the charger which then renders it useless as a mobile device 9) uninstall BOINC 10) tweet about how installing BOINC on your phone was the dumbest thing ever 11) read all the other tweets about people discovering that their cell phone battery has a maximum number of recharges and how crunching just reduced the life of their battery from 2 years to 2 months 12) realize that the only reason the phone companies support BOINC is to make themselves look good 13) read the stats that after 5 months of crunching 24/7, 2 million cell phones did the same amount of work as 1 P4 desktop 14) tweet "What's a P4 desktop and where can I get one, I hear it can do the same work as 2 million cell phones... that's the coolest thing ever!" |
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16)
Message boards :
Number crunching :
Building a Desktop for GPUGrid
(Message 35618)
Posted 3700 days ago by Dagorath Hi Lluis and welcome to GPUgrid, One of the biggest problems with GPUs is keeping them cool. As Zoltan said, if you put 2 cards on your motherboard you could have a problem keeping the top one cool due to heat rising into the card from the lower card. There are ways to overcome that problem but it requires some work on your part. And since you live in Spain where it can be very hot in the summer, cooling issues are worse for you. The easiest for you would be to sell your 660 and replace it with a single 670, 680 or 690 to avoid having 2 cards in the computer. Unfortunately that is also the most expensive solution. If you want to do some work customizing and modifying your computer there are ways you could add a second card and have a good chance they will both run cool but there are no guarantees. Your 660 OC probably has axial fans which look like this or like this. As Zoltan said, those cards dissipate the heat into the case which adds to the cooling problem. Cards with radial fans like this blow the heat out of the rear grill instead of into the case. If a card like yours with axial fans is in the lower slot it will blow heat into the fan of the card in the upper slot and cause it to run hotter. That would not a problem for me in Canada because here the ambient air temperature (the temperature of the air in the room) is much lower than for you in Spain. One solution is to put the card with axial fans in the upper slot but then the hot air blows into the CPU fan. You can solve that by putting a very large heatsink and fan on the CPU which is additional work and expense. A cheaper solution is to make a barrier from cardboard or other other non-conducting material and place it above the card with axial fans. The barrier would direct the hot air away from the other GPU or the CPU. Another solution is to add a high volume fan to blow or suck the hot air from the radial fans out of the case before it reaches the other GPU or CPU. You can remove the side of the case and place a mains powered fan to blow air into the case or you can cut a hole in the case side and install a 12 volt fan. You can make 12 volt fans much more effective by adding ducts to put the airflow exactly where you want it. You can make ducts with a little work or you can buy ducts that have the correct hole dimensions for attaching easily to computer fans. Ducts are very effective and relatively inexpensive. So the choice is add a second mid-range card and do some additional work or replace your mid-range card with a single high-end card. |
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17)
Message boards :
Number crunching :
What is so hard about Linux?
(Message 35559)
Posted 3705 days ago by Dagorath I'm not sure if AMD is harder to deal with in Linux. I've heard stories that say the greatest difficulty is getting AMD and NVIDIA to work side-by-side in Linux. We shall see as I will be receiving an AMD 7770 soon. I'll be putting it in with my 3 NVIDIA cards and will try to get it working. I would like to release 1 version of Crunchuntu that has drivers for AMD and NVIDIA pre-installed plus all the other features I've mentioned. If I can't make that work then I'll release 2 flavors of Crunchuntu: 1 for AMD and the other for NVIDIA. An update rfor anybody looking forward to Crunchuntu: Work on Crunchuntu is progressing, perhaps slowly, but it is progressing. The biggest problem I face is building the GUI. If it were not for the GUI it would be mostly done but I'm not as experienced with GUIs as I am with CLI apps. The latter are much easier but I said I would try to make it all GUI so that's what I'll try to do. |
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18)
Message boards :
Graphics cards (GPUs) :
Poor times with 780 ti
(Message 35483)
Posted 3709 days ago by Dagorath Under Windows, NVSMI shows the GPU temps and drivers for all cards, and more info for Titans, Quadro's and Teslas. There is no nvidia-smi in Linux. For Linux they ship the nvidia-settings app which, when run from command line with no args, starts the nvidi-settings GUI. If run with args (and there are a million possible args, just do 'man nvidia-settings' to read the manual) it exposes the driver API, very powerful. Or you can just click on the nvidia-settings icon to open the GUI which allows setting fan speeds if you've set coolbits in xorg.conf. It also gives a load of info and allows other tweaks such performance profile which can be used to increase performance. What nvidia-settings does not do is allow to set a target temperature and for that reason it is not the app it could be so I give it 4 out of 5 stars. I use calls to nvidia-settings extensively in my gpu_d script to get temp readings and to adjust fanspeed up and down for the purpose of maintaining the user specified target temp. |
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19)
Message boards :
Graphics cards (GPUs) :
Poor times with 780 ti
(Message 35469)
Posted 3709 days ago by Dagorath I was thinking more like I write the Linux version and make it look and feel like the Windows version as much as possible. The collaboration part would involve very little work from you. But that's a topic for a different discussion in a different thread some time in the future. PM if interested or I might PM you about it in a month or so. Right now I'm just discovering the power of GKrellM for Linux. I overlooked it for a while but today the light went on and I realized just how much it can do. It's awesome and will be included in Crunchuntu. |
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20)
Message boards :
Graphics cards (GPUs) :
Poor times with 780 ti
(Message 35462)
Posted 3710 days ago by Dagorath BTW, I have already contacted the author of BoincTasks about an integration with HWiNFO and he thinks it's a good idea, but is currently very busy. But I think this might be implemented sometime.. would be definitively interesting to see all sorts of sensor information from HWiNFO via BoincTasks. You're the author, excellent :-) Integration with BoincTasks would be very handy for all BOINC volunteers. BT runs on Linux too under Wine so integration would be cross platform compatible... perfect. I'm moving this "log data and graph it" thing to lowest priority on my "would like to code it" list and I intend to try HWiNFO for Linux ASAP. No, wait!! The hwinfo package for Linux is a different package! Or did you author it for Linux as well? If not then I would be interested in collaborating with you to make a Linux version of your HWiNFO so users can have the same experience on both platforms. First I have other stuff to clear off my plate but perhaps in a couple months... |
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