GPU Power...

Post by **rowpie** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 8:49 am

As many of you know I am a geek and gamer at heart and the more i read up on tech the more and more recently there has been about gpu acceleration.

nVidea and AMD both now tout there graphics card as being great for number crunching yet as far as I know no boinc project is supporting this method of computing?

Look what its done for the likes of the folding@home and you wonder why noone seems to have tried it yet.

I also think they need to start looking at a PS3 version of boinc as its processing power is seriously underused.

I know its another platform that would then need support and that boinc is many projects not one but if even one of them took the plunge then the benefits (not to mention the points) would be massive!!

Just looking for peoples thoughts on this because I know I could explain a 4 graphics card beast and a ps3 to family easier for gaming than i can say a half dozen pc's purley for number crunching so it would have its benefits that way as well.

Post by **Megacruncher** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 12:10 pm

I don't know much about it but there is a version of Boinc for the PS3 isn't there? And TSBT are doing pretty well with it. See here
Harnessing the power ifof the GPUs sounds like an exellent idea.

MacDitch · Post by **MacDitch** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 3:00 pm

There's a lot of interest around in harnessing the GPU power, but so far it is limited in application I think. The biggest thing against it seems to be that the GPU has a lower precision on floating point calculations than a regular CPU; this in turn makes it no use to many of the science applications.

I think (not got time to check) that there is some active development on SETI that you could look at....

dw1234 · Post by **dw1234** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:05 pm

I run Folding@Home on my GPUs and Boinc on my CPUs...

Folding@Home gave an example of how the new GTX 280 Nvidia card helped their software.

Quad CPU @ 2.66GHz 4ns of folding time per day
PS3 100ns per day
GTX 280 600ns per day

I hope Boinc goes to GPUs to!

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:52 am

update on this PS3grid can now be run on an nVidia GPU.
www.gpugrid.net for full details.

Finally GPU computing on BOINC! After delivering BOINC on Playstation last year, we are happy to announce that from today we are are able to distribute workunits on Nvidia GPUs. PS3grid.net and the new website GPUGRID.net go along to create a large infrastructure for biomolecular simulations. To run GPU workunits simply follow the instructions on the website.
Apart from us, this was made possible by a strong collaboration with BOINC developers and in particular David Anderson at Berkeley and Stefan and Keith from the BOINC community, already moderators at ps3grid. We also want to thank Nvidia for their important support.

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:11 am

Very interesting but at present it's only for Linux 64. A windows version might be along soon.
So, if you've got the special GPU version of boinc installed can you use your GPU & CPU for different projects or how does it work?

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:27 am

very interesting indeed i will be trying this today.

if it works well on a Nvidia GPU I will be investing in some better cooling for my 8800gt.

Post by **rowpie** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:15 am

bugger i've got ATI cards in my machines lol

look forward to see how it goes though.

Temujin · Post by **Temujin** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:18 am

if you've got the special GPU version of boinc installed can you use your GPU & CPU for different projects or how does it work?

Yes, you can

I have a q6600 and 8800GS graphics card, boinc now runs 3xseti WUs and 1xPS3Grid WU all at the same time :thumbup:

You just need to install nvidia cuda drivers & GPU version of boinc and attach to PS3Grid.
My q6600 normally runs 4xseti WUs, as soon as it had downloaded a ps3grid WU it paused 1 seti WU and started the ps3grid WU instead.

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:09 pm

I have set this up though on my Q6600 with 8800gt I am only doing two WCG units plus 1 PS3grid. I have checked system monitor and 1 cpu is definelty sitting idle.

Any ideas why?

Temujin · Post by **Temujin** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:20 pm

I have set this up though on my Q6600 with 8800gt I am only doing two WCG units plus 1 PS3grid. I have checked system monitor and 1 cpu is definelty sitting idle.

Any ideas why?

Are you expecting to see 2 ps3grid WUs running?
You only have 1 GPU, so only 1 ps3grid WU will run.

How many WCG WUs ran before attaching to PS3Grid?

Post by **rowpie** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:48 pm

sounds like you have it set to use no more than 2 cores on a multicore machine in the config options.

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 2:08 pm

In the new version the option is " On multiprocessor systems use at most xx% of the processsors"

This is set to 100%.

But something odd is going on. I just attached to Einstein now and straight away it started to crunch a wu.

So now crunching 2 WCG, 1 PS3 grid and 1 Einstein at the same time.

Not sure why?

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:33 am

First results on GPU.

http://www.gpugrid.net/workunit.php?wuid=30882

Thats means about 4000 per day on an XFX 8800gt Alpha Dog XXX + one core.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 10:54 am

This is very interesting to say the least

Looking at some of the discussion threads, there are some amazing gains to be had from this technology. Folding has used this approach for some time, but until now, I don't think it's been possible on Boinc.

The only fly in the ointment so far is quite a few errors and a whole lot of development going on. That's the nature of Alpha/Beta testing, but the feedback on the forum seems intelligent, responsive and committed. I'm sure they will get any remaining issues resolved very quickly.

None of my crunchers have high spec GPU's in them, they are all built around CPU's. That may change now.

Just now, it's only available 64 bit linux, (we have some decent guides to how to install that posted on this forum

), but there is talk of developing a Windows solution within a month or two.

Definitely one to keep an eye on 8)

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 9:13 pm

Latest update:

So far so good.

By assigning one core core of a quad + an 8800gt is giving me the expected 4000 per day.

See http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?userid=3971

Some units are having compute errors but so far it doesn't seem I have wasted any crunching time on these.

Each unit is taking about 12hrs and gets 1,987.41.

It does seem a bit of a waste of a good cpu core though since according to the forums there isn't a great deal of CPU power used. However it does use 100% cpu time since apparantly the cpu constantly monitors what's going on without actually calculating much.

By my calculations a core 2 duo with 2x8800gt(non sli mode) based cruncher would cost about Â£400 and be good for 8000 credits a day.

Would like to know what a GTX280 or a 9800 GX2 (needs 2 cpu cores) can achieve.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 11:10 pm

does seem a bit of a waste of a good cpu core though since according to the forums there isn't a great deal of CPU power used. However it does use 100% cpu time since apparantly the cpu constantly monitors what's going on without actually calculating much.

I read that bit too and got to thinking about running two instances of Boinc then setting the affinity of the second instance to use the single core tied to the GPU. It may then be possible to adjust the load of the two instances to more fully utilise the GPU attached core. Just now, I don't have the hardware to try it out, but that may be fixed soon enough.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 12:01 am

OK, I'm in 8)

Running a cheap and slow 8600GT off half a E4300 at stock on Ubuntu 8.04. Took a lot of hard work to get the cuda driver installed and it's still not right (the screen resolution is buggered - but hey it's crunching

)

Not sure how accurate this will be but it's completed 0.5% in 15 minutes, which if consistent means on that card it should complete in around 2 days, or ~ 1000 per day off a single core, with a spare CPU core to run something else 8)

Not exactly blistering, but the card is probably the limiting factor. Will be interesting to see what happens, but it should easily match the previous output of the box when it was running both CPU cores heavily overclocked. If it's stable and I can fix the driver setup, I might be tempted by something with a bit more oomph

/wonder if this thread should be moved to somewhere like the Boinc Alpha or Beta sections?

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 3:33 pm

I had similar issue with the display being gubbed.

From memory this is how i got it working:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

then a ctrl-alt-F1 to get to another login session.

Uninstall all nvidia drivers:
sudo apt-get remove nvidia*

Install nvidia driver.

sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1XX-XX-pkg1.run

rebooted and everything worked

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:14 pm

From memory this is how i got it working: ........

Tried that several times last night. TBH I was going round in circles because the card wasn't recognised by FC6 or Ubuntu 7.04/7.10, so had to go up to Ubuntu 8.04 then install the drivers using Envy.

That's when the fun really started....I only had 640.480 and 320x240

OK, so real men don't click, but in this case it is rather essential in getting Boinc up and running on the GPU. Faffing around alot, I managed to use tabbed keyboarding to set 1024x768 spanning on the monitor which was enough to get some kind of usable gui to launch boincmgr.

Fiddled around with xorg.conf several times, broke it several times and went back to my low res Heath Robinson settings to run overnight.

So, came home this evening with a fresh mind....System> Preferences> Main Menu> Other> Select Screens and Graphics, set 1024x768 and wham we're in business.

Curiously the Screen Resolution in the Preferences menu previously only had the low res options, I guess that's why I didn't thing about adding extra using the gui rather than hand crafting xorg.conf

Anyway, it's still running, Xorg is taking a bit more CPU than I would like, but the GPU has completed 37% in 18 hours. Not speed of light, but if it runs ok for the next few days, I'll think about putting in a 8800/9800 or even a GTX

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 11:19 pm

So...44 hours in and it's done 90% of the first WU. Should complete in about 3-4 hours, so I'll catch it in the morning.

It appears completely stable here, albeit somewhat slower than sneaky's card. The box should reach a rac of 1000 from the 8600GT GPU plus Einstein or similar on the spare CPU core. It should double it's output compared to WCG and be somewhere between 30% and 50% up on normal projects 8).

Despite the project being beta still, I think the cat is out of the bag and several other projects are looking seriously to port to GPU's too.

So, two 8800GT's should arrive on Saturday. They should transform some meagre E4300's into real power crunchers.

So long as the project is stable, it looks like that race to 10M is not over yet

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 9:23 am

Yes this really does look like the way to go and I am totally converted. My single Q6600 (OC'd to 3.0Ghz) + single 8800gt is now nudging 8000 credits per day between doing Einstien and PS3Grid.

I was looking to spend Â£300 last week on another cruncher but the day I was gong to buy i found out about the GPU stuff. So put things on hold. Was going to buy another quad but and now thinking of an overclocked E2180 + 2x8800GT which should also be good for 8000.

Considering my lowely 1500 per day average earlier in year. i may have the possiblity of doing about 16k per day, my 1st million will be a lot closer coming!!

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 10:55 am

Why does Linux have to make everything so difficult!
Installed my shiny new 8800 card rebooted low graphics mode!
Fine update the driver.
Won't update the driver unless I login as root.
OK logout and go to login "Unable to login as root from this screen" WTF?
Reboot get to the login screen again and yep still won't let me login.
Go to my other Linux machine hit switch users and can login as root no problem.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 12:21 pm

First points on the board, as expected just shy of 1000 per day off the 8600GT 8)

Had a little hiccup with an extra stick of ram I put in the box late last night, but sorted that out this morning and she completed a few hours later.

For drivers, you could install Envy and let it do it all for you. If you still have low res graphics after upgrade to the drivers, you should check your xorg.conf. TBH though I'm still twitchy about the trouble I had the other night with screen res at 320x240, so I don't have much advice to offer.

Anyway, as sneaky says, a 8800GT should do about 4000 per day, so I expect my E4300's should reach about a rac of around 5000.

Just be careful to ensure you either get a PCI-E x16 card or your mobo has PCI-E 2.0, otherwise you may have a non-booting mobo.

Post by **rowpie** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 4:55 pm

you know this is pure evil.

the gamer in me wants to go and spend Â£600 on a new pc right now and the best bang for buck is the ATI 4700 right now but there is no GPGPU going on for it right now...

Argh!!!

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:55 pm

I am now interested in finding out the best value video cards for this.

Nightlord what 8800gt did you buy? Mine is this the XFX 8800gt Alpha Dog XXX. Its GPU clock speed is 670Mhz. Want to compare crunching times.

Interested in knowing how much difference clock speed makes? Is performance mainly down to number of stream processors? Does amount and speed of video memory make any difference? I don't expect size of video memory to make any difference but you never know.

Nightlord the 8600gt has 32 streams, did the 8800gt crunch in the expected 32/112 time ratio compared to 8800gt?

Looking to buy at another video card but can't decide between.

From Scan best options seem to be.

XFX 8800gt 600Mhz 256Mb for Â£82 (112 Stream)
or
XFX 9800gtx xt 720Mhz 512Mb for Â£129 (128 Stream)
or
Leadtek GTX260 576Mhz for Â£193 (192 Stream)

Can't quite decide what to go for. Thing I don't like about 8800gt is the single slot cooling i.e. air doesn't vent outside case. Where as 9800GTX is two slot so vents hot air out case, so probably sway towards this one.

Any comments?

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sun Jul 27, 2008 3:09 pm

My cards are ZOTAC 8800GT's, they come factory overclocked at 700/1000MHZ

They're nice and cheap from Ebuyer at Â£90 here 8)

Not only were they one of the least expensive, but they are also PCI-E x16 as well as PCI-E 2.0 compliant. This is important on my hardware.

The 8600GT that I ran one box on for a few days took 49 hours for a full WU, the 8800GT's are running WU's in a shade over 12, so it looks like a direct 4:1 ratio. This means the 8600GT will crunch and meet the project deadlines, but it's only worth ~1000 per day, which one can achieve on half a core 2 processor anyway. So if credit is the motivating factor, the 8600GT isn't worth it.

Yesterday I had a lot of problems with the second card, it was erroring every unit. I reduced the clocks down to 650/950MHZ (1900 effective) and switched the CPU back to factory (removed the o/c on it). Since then it's been solid as a rock. I calculated only a small reduction in crunch times after reducing the clocks down. This seems a little odd, but perhaps there is some other bottleneck that I haven't seen yet. The crunch times between the card on an overclocked E4300 CPU and the CPU at stock are pretty much identical. This means I can reduce the power bill quite a lot on those boxes if I wanted to sacrifice the second core output on CPU projects - unlikely though

I also found some good tips for tweaking the performance of the card. Install nvclock:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install nvclock

then

Code: Select all

nvclock -h

for options.

I found that the fan was set at 33% duty cycle by default. My temps were reported at 65C, but by switching to

Code: Select all

nvclock -f -F 100

the fans ran at 100% speed and the temps reduced down to 48C 8)

This is also the way I reduced the o/c on the cards. Installing nvclock also gives you a nice extra panel in the GUI nvidia-settings, though I can't find a way to save the frequency settings from there.

Be very careful using nvclock though, one slip on the keyboard and you could irreparably damage the card.

In terms of cooling, I'm happy with the fans running at 100% now, the boxes seems stable and not too hot, though I keep the side panel off by default to allow cool air in. If the boxes had the side panel on, I might be tempted to put an exhaust blower to vent out a spare PCI slot.

Looking at the project right now, I think another 8800GT might be worthwhile. Personally I wouldn't stretch to a GTX just now - the project is still developing.

//edit

sorry a bit misleading - I forgot that I had to make a change to xorg.conf by adding Option "coolbits" "1" in the Device section.

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Boardname	"vesa"
	Busid		"PCI:2:0:0"
	Driver		"nvidia"
	Screen	0
	Option		"Coolbits" "1"
EndSection

Adding this option gives access the clock frequencies in the GUI, but it's still nvclock that I used to modify.

Odd that the board name is set to "vesa", that's what the Envy install set it to, rather than me.

sneakysaurus · Post by **sneakysaurus** » Sun Jul 27, 2008 7:17 pm

I use nvclock myself. My card always stayed at 30% fan speed even after a bios update from XFX. XFX said the card is designed to run hot but playing Crysis my card got to 90 degrees, the new bios didn't make any difference in terms of auto fan speed so better to manually set it.

I usually run it about 60%. 100% is way too noisy.

I always wondered why I couldn't adjust the speed so will try the Option "Coolbits" "1" config.

Cheers for that.

Never tried Envy so might give it a go sometime.

The 8800gt is a hot card anyway. Up till last week I too had the side of the case but upgraded to an Antec Gamer 900 case which keeps everything nice and cool with some good airflow especially with an extra 120mm fan on the side to blow more air on video card.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sat Aug 09, 2008 3:10 pm

A couple of weeks in and everything seems sweet.

I read on the GPU-grid forum somewhere that the CPU core tied to the GPU was idling most of the time waiting for the GPU. That got me thinking about the power of the CPU that is needed to drive the GPU. Previously I installed cards on E4300 Core 2 Duo boxes. Last night I got to play with an old 3GHz P4 HT that was struggling to achieve 1000 RAC , in fact it was closer to 800RAC even on decent paying projects.

So I popped in an old 8600GT, installed Ubuntu 8.04 64bit and hey presto the box crunches on the GPU! It does show some slight signs of slowdown doing normal things, so i won't be attaching it to another project. However, with an upgrade to an 8800GT this box will have been transformed from a 800 pts-per-day sloth into a hot-headed young gun that should achieve 4000 RAC

So save your quads for other things, go GPU on low power core 2 or even older and watch your overall RAC rise

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sun Aug 10, 2008 11:21 pm

Oooh, ahhhh, this is getting really interesting.......

New GPU capable Boinc client available:

1) It reports the name of the GPU on the client messages.
2) It is ready to support multiple GPUs (We have to test it yet).
3) It fixes a bug which was wrongly setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. (From the first runs with the new client, it did not seem to fix the libcudart.so not found problem of some machines though, but let's test some more days).

(my highlighting in bold)

Link: http://www.ps3grid.net/forum_thread.php?id=276

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:56 pm

Windows App now available

Trying it on my 8600GT under 32bit Vista. Looks OK after 15 minutes run. If it runs ok overnight, I may try an ever-so slightly slightly faster card tomorrow

Post by **Megacruncher** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 11:57 pm

Yeehar!!! Let's go!
TBH I wasn't looking forward to exploring the dark arts of getting Linux cranked up again (any OS that can't recognise a SATA drive without more expert instruction than I can provide should reconsider its viability :) )

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 12:11 am

Indeed, the Dark Arts were needed up to now on this project, but 140k in less than 3 weeks from two E4300's has to be worth the slog 8)

Anyway, just a couple of tips (should hold true for Windows too)....

Be sure to install the cuda drivers, not the drivers that come with the card. The link to the Nvidia site is on the GPU front page. You can also download Ntune from Nvidia to give you a whole host of goodies, but be careful with the clocks. GPUgrid seems very sensitive to o/c on the card.

Also you must use the development version Boinc v6.3.8 which recognises cuda enabled cards, otherwise you are running ordinary CPU's.

I found a couple of quirks on Boinc v6 - for some reason BoincView doesn't like periodic polling of these machines, yet manual updates work. Boinc also refuses to accept any command from BoincView on those boxes.

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:36 am

Well after trying in Linux I put my 8800GT into a Windoze box, installed all the drivers etc and I still can't get it to work!

Post by **rowpie** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 1:01 pm

there you go guys. who will top this beast first.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/08/14 ... me-setup/1

Post by **Megacruncher** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:20 pm

I can't get it to run without instant error messages.

I'll keep trying it.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 11:14 pm

I can see your errors on the GPUgrid site. Are there any messages in Boinc that give extra info?

Is your card over clocked (even factory o/c'd)? I found that the project was very sensitive to overclock on the GPU, also on the CPU too.

The only obvious thing I can see from the results so far is that you picked up a new app (version 6.29 which was released late last night). I'm currently running 6.28 on the Vista box.

Post by **Megacruncher** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 11:50 pm

No other errors. I don't know if the card was factory overclocked. How can I find out?

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:06 am

Okay, I found Nvidia ntune. The card doesn't seem to be overclocked. I have underclocked it as far as possible to exclude this possibility. Sadly I can't have any work as I've had my 4 WU for the day.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:07 am

This is on the AMD9600 under Vista?

Right click on the desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel. Under Select a Task go to Performance and select Adjust GPU settings. Compare your card against the Nvidia site here.

From the Performance settings in control panel you can tweak the Core and memory clocks. Also look for nTune from here which helps tweak fan speeds etc.

BTW, I checked a few of your other WU's with the same error and they were crunched by others on app v 6.28 with similar errors, so it's not the new app from last night.

Which card is it by the way?

/edit......like ships passing in the night, our posts crossed in the ether

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:41 am

You've got the correct PC. The card is an 8600GTS which should be up to the job though not necessarily a stellar performer.

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:50 am

Arse! I just tried it on a quad with a 9600GT specially bought for the purpose. Instant computation error!

I'll declock this one too & see what happens.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 7:06 am

How hard is the CPU clocked? I found on my E4300's, just a slight back-off on the CPU overclock made the thing much more stable.

You could try a quick test with everything at stock - if it fails then, you know it's not the CPU clock.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 10:40 pm

Well, if it helps make you feel better, my GTX card for Vista seems quite unstable. The 8600GT ran two WU under Linux on the same box just fine. It also ran half a unit on Vista too. I swapped out cards last night and the PC has been crashing regularly since. The WU's haven't been trashed, so I'm lucky to be able to carry on.

I know the box is stable, so it maybe the PSU isn't up the the job, or the card is pushing that hardware. I also know this card had problems in a Linux box, but I put that down the the flaky Linux drives for this particular card.

So I just reduced the clocks on the GPU down to 500/900 and we'll see how it goes.

If it runs, that's great, but having to under-clock to get it to run goes against the grain

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 11:13 pm

I just tried another WU with the card slowed down to minimum. Like the others it crashed straight away.

These are the Boinc Manager messages
15/08/2008 23:04:38|PS3GRID|Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 30499 seconds of work, reporting 0 completed tasks
15/08/2008 23:04:44|PS3GRID|Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
15/08/2008 23:04:46|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-LICENSE
15/08/2008 23:04:46|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-COPYRIGHT
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-LICENSE
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-COPYRIGHT
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.coor
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.vel
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.coor
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.vel
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-input.idx
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.pdb
15/08/2008 23:04:53|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-input.idx
15/08/2008 23:04:53|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.psf
15/08/2008 23:05:00|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.pdb
15/08/2008 23:05:00|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-parameters
15/08/2008 23:05:02|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-parameters
15/08/2008 23:05:02|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-GPUTEST2
15/08/2008 23:05:03|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-GPUTEST2
15/08/2008 23:05:06|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.psf
15/08/2008 23:05:07|PS3GRID|Starting oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2
15/08/2008 23:05:08|PS3GRID|Starting task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 using acemd version 629
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Computation for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 finished
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_1 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_2 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_3 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:14|PS3GRID|Started upload of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_0
15/08/2008 23:05:16|PS3GRID|Finished upload of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_0

Temujin · Post by **Temujin** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 11:41 pm

I just tried another WU with the card slowed down to minimum. Like the others it crashed straight away. Sad These are the Boinc Manager messages
15/08/2008 23:04:38|PS3GRID|Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 30499 seconds of work, reporting 0 completed tasks
15/08/2008 23:04:44|PS3GRID|Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
15/08/2008 23:04:46|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-LICENSE
15/08/2008 23:04:46|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-COPYRIGHT
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-LICENSE
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-COPYRIGHT
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.coor
15/08/2008 23:04:48|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.vel
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.coor
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-eq.vel
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-input.idx
15/08/2008 23:04:52|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.pdb
15/08/2008 23:04:53|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-input.idx
15/08/2008 23:04:53|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.psf
15/08/2008 23:05:00|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.pdb
15/08/2008 23:05:00|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-parameters
15/08/2008 23:05:02|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-parameters
15/08/2008 23:05:02|PS3GRID|Started download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-GPUTEST2
15/08/2008 23:05:03|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-GPUTEST2
15/08/2008 23:05:06|PS3GRID|Finished download of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-grama.ionized.psf
15/08/2008 23:05:07|PS3GRID|Starting oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2
15/08/2008 23:05:08|PS3GRID|Starting task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 using acemd version 629
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Computation for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 finished
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_1 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_2 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:12|PS3GRID|Output file oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_3 for task oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2 absent
15/08/2008 23:05:14|PS3GRID|Started upload of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_0
15/08/2008 23:05:16|PS3GRID|Finished upload of oY28128-GPUTEST2-0-10-acemd_2_0

Its been suggested that installing .net framework 2 can improve things, maybe its worth giving it a go.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 12:10 am

Turns out my errors on Vista are the same as Megacruncher's, see here

Odd that one WU got through ok on a slow card.

Anyway, I ran a full hour of NVidia Stability Test (with Boinc disabled) and had no crashes, so I don't think it's the system or card

Its been suggested that installing .net framework 2 can improve things, maybe its worth giving it

.net2 comes built into Vista, so I'm trying .net 3.5 SP1 just now.

//edit
Bloomin 'eck that took a long while to install

Anyway it's getting late, so I picked up two more WU and set it off crunching away with .net framework 3.5 SP1 installed. 5 minutes in and it's done 0.6% and no crash. Let's see where it is in the morning

Post by **Megacruncher** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 1:21 am

Well, windose doesn't work, yet!

I've enough bit and pieces that I can build a system to run the 9600GT in a linux system and see if it works there. This will be my weekend project.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 9:56 am

Your 9600GT should run just fine under 64bit Linux. 8)

Here, the Vista box ran most of the night after I upgraded to .Net 3.5. It crashed once, but I think that may have been a different problem. I think this card is stressing the PSU, so I've just swapped it out for a higher 5v rated rail unit and we'll see what happens.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 4:00 pm

bottom!

That wasn't it

Same errors as before. I found several references to BSOD (which is what I have been having) on the Folding forums. They have had many similar issues. The solution (in some cases it's been running for 2 weeks without fail) is to update to Nvidia 177.41 or beyond. So I've downloaded and installed 177.79. It works just fine, but I'm over my daily allocation of units now, so I'll have to wait until later to grab some more.

Just now the box has been running for nearly an hour with two QMC WU's running from the CPU under Boinc 6.3.8. No errors or crashes, so maybe the drivers don't support cuda apps that well?

More news later if/when I get some GPU WU's.

//I should add that the box runs GPU off a 8600GT fine, so with the right hardware I can get Vista to run GPU.....