New Boinc Client 6.4.5 with CUDA support

robinx

robinx

robinx

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19 Dec 2008
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8
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UK, SW
Hi all,
I've long been a member of the OC'UK S@H team, and often visited here to read the lively threads :)
This coming year I hope to become activly involved at last!

I noticed yesterday in the BOINC messages that it said there was a new client, so I found it, installed it, and even read the brief info on the CUDA support on the Berkley site, but I still don't think its using my 8800GT as the temps arn't very high (I tend to keep the fan speed down using a manual setting to around 40%, and its only on about 58C.) and the times on the currently running tasks appear to be the same as normal.

I wonder if anyone knows how to check if its using it please? Or to make sure it does ... as it sounds like it should do the work considerably faster?

Happy New Year!

S@H - kruptikos
 
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It will tell you in BOINC manger if it is running CUDA. You should see something like "Seti@Home Enhanced 6.05 CUDA" as the application and status should show "Running. 0.03 CPUs, 1 CUDA". Have you got the latest CUDA supported drivers from nVidia?
 
I just downloaded the latest drivers ta, and restarted, I guess I need to wait for it to download some WU's for it?
 
Yeah it should do, your cache may be full of standard WU's at the moment. Once they are sorted though you should be away!

I'm chasing you down by the way, prepare to be parped! ;)
 
Well I would've been. I'm getting constant computation errors now which crash the display driver... It needs a reboot then. Oh well. I've tried the latest release CUDA driver and the beta and it does it with both.

edit: Looks like I had a stack load of VLAR's. I've cleared these out and all is well now!
 
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You need to have a BETA account and the credit is not transferable at the mo. Also, play around with the settings to see what suits your machine best, 4 + 1GPU or 3+1 GPU with one core feeding. In addition, as it is a test program, the credit validation is VERY slow, I currently have no credit with 34,129 credits pending!
Having said all that - its fast, seriously fast and I cant wait for it to go mainstream.
 
It's no longer BETA, CUDA is now live :) Just updated to 6.06 as well.

Personally I'm finding better performance running 3 AP with the last CPU covering the two CUDA processes. (edit: I set affinity to each of the AP processes as well, leaving one cpu free for the CUDA's etc. Works better that way in Vista 64 for me).
 
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Until yesterday I still didn't have any cuda wu's - CPU was doing seti wu's in about 2 hrs I guess, and AP's in about 29hrs.

I installed Vista64 last night, installed Boinc (latest ver) which then downloaded the new seti 6.06 wu's - in the Status column for the ONE running seti wu it says - Running, high priority (0.03 CPU's, 1 CUDA)

But only 1 Seti wu is being worked on - the CPU appeared to be only working on AP's - and the time had jumped up to over 100hrs.

I've now turned off the option to work on AP's, but its still only running by the look of it 1 wu on the GPU (CPU hardly being used at all)

Can you advise how I would get the CPU back to running on 3 cores at least on seti wu's, or back to normal speed on AP's? And it wasn't just a random large AP, I cancelled loads to check if that was the case ...

Any pointers appricated, so I can get production back to normal.
Thank you
 
OK - the one cpu is lost to feeding the GPU. CUDA does not crunch AP units yet.
To use all your cores create a cc_config.xml file containing the following and stick it in your projects directory

<cc_config>
<options>
<ncpus>3</ncpus> - where 3 = all my cores + 1 for the GPU
</options>
</cc_config>

Using all your cores will bring the machine to a halt, I had posted bout this on the seti forums (no answer yet) as using 0.07 CPU to feed the GPU shouldn't bring my PC to a halt. I solved it by playing around with resource share and CPU time in the prefs for BOINC manager.

In addition

CUDA forums
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_forum.php?id=631

Modified astropulse and CUDA seti binaries
http://lunatics.kwsn.net/gpu-crunch...-gpu-utilize.msg12177.html;topicseen#msg12177

From what I have read and experienced, there is no way the CUDA client should have come out of BETA yet, I gather the decision was political rather than scientific, but there is a lot of work going on to improve things

Hope some of this helps
 
The one thing I'd add to the post above is that normal WUs cannot be run on the CPU if there's a CUDA WU running. AP WUs can, as can WUs from other projects, but SETI Enhanced WUs will not be downloaded for the CPU if there are any CUDA WUs present. Quite why this is I don't know, but apparently the developers are working on it.
 
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