The Scottish Boinc Team

OK, after a fruitless weekend of trying to get GPU running well on Vista, I've come the the following conclusions:

1. My shiny new GTX260 card is too power hungry for any PSU I've got. The PSU is sagging and causing BSOD's at random times. This happens on Windows and Linux. Solution: buy a big PSU. 8)

2. The Nvidia drivers for the GTX260 don't sit well with Vista. I had numerous errors and complaints from Vista after the drivers were installed, whether or not the card was running. In fact, even with a slow 8600GT I would still get the OS crashes. Solution: wait for better drivers or find a XP box to try

3. The Windows science app is buggy and prone to error out. Even running the 8600GT, I have several WU that failed. Solution: wait for better Windows science app (noting the responsive nature of the project, I think this will not be long )

It's relativley easy to get GPU up and running on Linux 64 bit. Install Ubuntu 8.04 64bit. Install Envy from third party software sources. Use Envy to install the Nvidia driver. Download Boinc 6.3.8 and away you go.

So I put the trusty old 8600GT on a third linux box as a test bed until I get a f-big power supply for the GTX260

Yup I think I'll just have to wait for a better windows app too. It was too hot this for me to put together yet another PC to try out the Linux version & past attempts to install Linux on the PCs with the decent GPUs have never got past the drive detection stage.

Good news I moved the 9600 card into a linux box.
Better news I got Fedora 8 & Boinc Running no problem.
Problem: No way could I get the nVidia drivers to install, it seems they don't have anything suitable for my Kernal [WETFTI] & finally I broke my GUI.
Consolation I worked out how to get Boinc started from the command-line so that'll be some help to the WCG cause. until I can figure out GPUGrid.

Would I be better with Ubuntu?

Now this is slightly embarrassing.....I couldn't get the drivers to install on Fedora either. Spent hours footerin' about and like you ended up breaking things.

Ubuntu 8.04 64bit runs them fine. Install Envy using Synaptic Package manager. Then from the Applications/System menu use Envy to install the drivers: with a bit of luck the drivers for your card will be automatically available. Your 9600GT will be quite slow though. The app has changed and added about 20% crunch time.

Be prepared for several failed units at first. For new installations, I download 1 WU, set no new work and let it run. After, I'm sure I'm sure it's ok, I then set allow new work.

It's likely that you will still have several "result not found" errors at first, but be patient - they seem to disappear after a while.

A little tip (assuming you are using Ubuntu), if your breach you daily quota due to failed units. Useful if you trip up over drivers etc..........

Shutdown Boinc and Boinc Manager. Use System monitor to verify Boinc is closed, kill it if it isn't. Then copy the entire contents of your BOINC folder to BOINC.old (or similar). Next, use Admin/Network to set a new Host name and reboot. Next, install boinc again using the installation shell script sh boinc...blah blah... .sh. This will give you a completely new installation under a new host name, so now attach to the project again and you should now have a new installation that can download a further 2-4 WU. When everything is running fine and dandy, you can merge the PC's back together on the website if you so wish.

Reassuring to know that even the guru couldn't do it. I'll try again with Ubuntu.

Depending on your card, you may wish to hang fire for a day or two. New drivers are Cuda 2.0, the apps are compiled for Cuda 1.1....Nvidia said it would be ok, but clearly they were wrong.

This thread http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=303 explains it all, in particular this post http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php ... =true#1643.

This explains why I couldn't get my GTX card running: GTX cards are only supported by 177.xx drivers which are Cuda 2.0

Oh well, when it's fixed, I should be able to get the GTX card running too

So, it's Tuesday evening and where are we with the project?

Well in some cases a good deal further on 8) , and in other cases a huge disappointment

First the good news
New science apps were released for Linux and Windows that appear to have resolved many of the stability issues. The problems stem (as far as I can tell) from the Cuda 2.0 technology required to for the newer Nvidia drivers being incompatible with the earlier science apps. The developer(s) have released new apps compatible with Cuda 2.0 and in most cases dead cards have sprung into life! 8)

Now the bad news
Earlier technology cards (even those still on sale today) may not be compatible with Cuda 2.0. If the card only supports Cuda 1.0, your out of luck As far as I can tell, this includes older 8600 and some 8800 cards. Most 8800 series, all 9000 series and all GTX cards should be ok. There will be no fix for this without significant development work by the project and I suspect they don't have the resource while trying to bring up such a leading edge project

So, where does that leave your intrepid reporter? Well I got lucky: my 8800GT cards are compatible and the GTX260 is now helping to keep the room warm too. A new version of GPU capable Boinc fixes a problem with rpc on Windows. This allows one to monitor using BoincView now too. Hopefully that will propagate to Linux soon enough.

Right now, if you have a modern 8800 card or a 9000 or GTX card, it is easy enough to get running on Windows (XP or Vista). Download and install the 177.xx Nvidia drivers (make sure they are the 177.xx or you will be dead in the water). Download the development version of Boinc 6.3.10, connect the the project and crunch away. Any problems encountered are usually due to overclock on the CPU or GPU. Under Windows, use NTune to de-clock the GPU, but don't try to de-clock under Linux just yet (especially, not if you suffer from epilepsy....but that's another story).

I'm investigating a slight issue on Boinc 6.3.10 that crashed a GPU WU when a parallel CPU project reported a result. Otherwise it's a flier and my GPU output should peak somewhere around 15-16k per day when the dust settles....not bad for 3 dual core E4300's and a crusty old P4

Okay I've done what you say with the 8600GTS on the Phenom. And it's still running! 25 minutes on and it's still going (a personal stability record by about 24min59.5sec! It's only done about 1% which means it will take about 45hrs to finish but with 3 cores doing other stuff meanwhile that will be a useful boost to this machines output!

If it works to completion I'll move the 9600 into a windows box (probably my sons' E6600) and set it to work too.

This promises to be a very useful upgrade route. I've 2 E6600s which might be better given a decent graphics card than a Mobo/CPU transplant!

Something that amazes me is that there are only 20 UK users for this rather exciting project. A quarter of them are with TSBT so this is a real chance to steal a march on the opposition.

Well finally Boinc manager says it has found a GPU.
Can't get any work from the project but at least it seems to be connected.
Will just have to hope it runs smoothly unattended as I'm heading offshore in a few hours.

My first unit is still alive - 45% in 19hrs - the only problem is that BM has downloaded 3 more which I'll never finish in the 4 days allowed Anybody know whether they enforce the WU deadlines or do I need to do some deleting. Could it be that BM is failing to distinguish between the my solitary GPU and the rather more plentiful CPU cores?

Could it be that BM is failing to distinguish between the my solitary GPU and the rather more plentiful CPU cores?

Hit the nail on the head there.

Currently Boinc recognises your CPU cores rather than GPU cards. With a 8600GT you may just squeak two units inside the 4 day window, but it will be tight.

I've never got a WU past the timeout, so I can't say, but at a guess, I think it's implemented in the server code. So those extra WU are toast without a higher spec card (it's all down to the number of parallel processors).

A way to prevent excess download is to restrict the number of active CPU's In project preferences (IIRC), set it to a different location ....school, home, work etc. Then set to use 1 processor for that location. It may stuff up other projects on that box though.

Perhaps best to invest in a 8800GT higher on the quad, they can run a GPU WU in 12hrs more or less.

Well looks like I've got 2 w/u's crunching away.
Fingers crossed.

Once it's done I'll move the 8600GTS to a dual core machine. In the meantime I shifted the 9600GT into the 32bit Vista Q6600 [seemed a shame to waste it on command line Linux ] and went thru the driver palaver.

It seems to be working and 30minutes on it is still running and has done 2.5% of the first WU. I make that 20hrs per WU (if it works!)

That makes a useful difference to that PC
Up til now: 4 cores running optimised SETI @ 42/h = 4032/d
Hopefully from now: 3 cores running optimised SETI @ 42/h = 3024/d
plus GPU 2300/d = Total 5324
Of course the difference would be even bigger if you were running WCG.

Once I've got some work actually finished and credit returned I'll move that 8600 and then get something beefier to put into the phenom.

Any recommendations for the best card for this project?

Any recommendations for the best card for this project?

The beefier the better!

My GTX260 does a WU in a little over 9 hours. That will average about 5000/day plus whatever the other core is doing.

Should be even better on a GTX280, but that's getting seriously expensive

Which projects can they attach to?

At present there is just one Boinc powered project running this technology - PS3Grid/GPUGrid here -> http://www.gpugrid.net/

Although one one project, it's leading edge stuff, so I expect more in the future

Yes!! I got my first credits for PS3Grid! nearly 2K for 42.5 hours isn't brilliant (this is the 8600) but it's more than the core on the phenom would have managed unaided. The 2K for 20hours on the 9600 is much more impressive! :)

First 2 results reported back
145 cr/hr GT8800 - 13.5 hours per w/u. 8)

Wheyhey! We are moving in this project. Top ten and boinc points here we come!

This just gets better and better.....

A bug in the flop counting has been corrected. As a result, credit is now increased fom 1987 to 3232 per WU

My GTX260 just crunched one resulting in about 350 cr/hr. http://www.ps3grid.net/results.php?hostid=7555

I think I'm imagining this......Somebody give me smelling salts please

Link to thread on forum: http://www.ps3grid.net/forum_thread.php?id=320

Foock me that thats an awesome 8400 per day!!!


Might invest in another GPU when I get back from holiday.

Foock me that thats an awesome 8400 per day!!!


Might invest in another GPU ....

I might invest in another 8 one for each desktop. Now that would be an extra 64,000 per day!!

Mega, get them in today and you could be first to 10m?

I see I'm going to be relegated back to 3rd shortly. Go for it. I accomplished my goal.

I might invest in another 8 one for each desktop

I'm happy enough with three 8800's and a GTX just now. Combined they should average 24k per day, with potential for further uplift when they remove the debug code that went in last week

I have the slow 8600GT that should run ok on a XP box, so I might pop that in for an extra 1600 per day 8)

It's kind of hard to believe this avalanche of credit and it's almost an like having an embarrassment of riches. Then when one remembers the GTX card has 192 parallel processing units it hits home just how much science these things are capable of

I finally spent some time looking at this stuff properly this afternoon. The result being that I finally realised that my 1Gb graphic card is no use - it's a 7950; possibly the latest model that isn't supported.

It's kind of hard to believe this avalanche of credit and it's almost an like having an embarrassment of riches. Then when one remembers the GTX card has 192 parallel processing units it hits home just how much science these things are capable of

It's amazing really but you've got to worry that as soon as you get home with £2,000 worth of top end video cards that the project disappears. It also does mean that if I do fully kit out the farm with 280s then the contributions of the CPUs will be relatively trivial and I might as well have never bothered up grading from Athlon XPs to Quads. Still got to move with the times.

I thought I would give this a try, always looking for things to experiemnt with. So I've installed the latest CUDA drivers, downloaded and installed the application from the site and have one WU running.

I didn't notice any difference, except that the temp of my 8600GTS card has gone from 50 DeC to 75 DegC. Something must be happening.

The WU says it whould run for 6hrs 14mins, and has done 16 mins so far. I'll let you know tomorrow when it finishes how it went.

System is Q6600 @ 2.8GHz, 8600GTS OC graphics card & 3Gb of memory with WinXP SP£.

If your 8600 is like mine it might be Monday before it finishes, 42.5 hr the first one took. Still at current rates that's about 75Cr/hr or 1800/day which you'd be hard pushed to earn on a single core any other way. Having said which your card is overclocked & mine isn't so you should do even better.

Welcome aboard!

Since you are running it on a quad, boinc will have downloaded a further 3 WU's, you might get a second of these done, but I doubt the 3rd and 4th will be completed within the deadline.

There are a couple of options: upgrade the card to 8800 series card - they complete in around 14 hours, switch the 8600 card to a dual core processor box if you have one, or set the Boinc client to use on 2 CPU's (but that will affect other projects you have running on the box).

It's early days and these problems will get fixed as further releases of Boinc come out.

Enjoy!

(edited for duplicated info that Willie posted while I was typing!)

Hi guys, thanks for the info. I don't have another box to use so I'm stuck with waiting it out till completion. As you said I have 4 WUs d'loaded and the running one is increasing it's Time to Complete at about the same rate as it's runtime. Currently at 3hrs runtime and 8 hrs to completion. Looking at the % complete vs runtime, it looks like it will take about 45 hrs to complete. The deadlime is 3rd Sep, so I don't think I'll get them completed on time, particularly as I don't run 24x7. I've set it to No More New Tasks so I can see how it will run, the extra tasks will get aborted if they aren't going to complete.

I was surprised to see all the cores still running at 100%. I expected the GPU to take over the hard work and let one core of the CPU relax a bit.

Off to check the cost of graphics card updates.

Ian

Well with all this talk of gpu I decided to have a look at what i have sitting around. All my desktops are Ati apart from one. The one i have is a lowly Geforce 6600 does anyonee know if this is supported? I tried to check the site but its down for maintenance at the moment.

Unfortunately the 6600 is not supported.

As a minimum the 8600 series is needed, but they are not recommended: if you are looking to spend some cash, but at the same time keep costs down, better to go with a 8800GT.

There is a link on the front page of the website that shows which cards are capable, but like you say, it's down just now.

Off to check the cost of graphics card updates

Be careful here. A higher end graphics card may also require a better power supply. They use a lot of power. Might be wise to take your PSU model # along with you to see if it can handle the extra load. My neighbor had this problem when he updated.

PSU should be OK, it's a Hiper Type-R 580W modular. But after looking at the higher end cards, they wont fit my case anyway. The end of the graphics card goes exactly where my drive cage is, and overlaps it by abot 1"". I would need to find somewhere to relocate 4 off my HDDs to let anything bigger than my 8600GTS fit the case. That would be a major piece of metalworking, and I'm not ready to buy a new case yet.
To add to the that, I would also need to replace all of my 6 SATA cables with ones with low-profile L-connectors as the end of the graphics card passes over the SATA connectors.

So I think a graphics card update is on hold for the moment.

Ian

Indeed the top end graphics cards are HUGE. I just fitted a GX260 into an mATX case and it fills it. It also weighs about as much as my laptop. Fortunately I only have the one HDD to worry about and that has gone to cuddle up with the DVD drive while the 3.5inch bays are is filled with the arse-end of giant graphics card.

I just hope PS3Grid gets online again soon or I'm going to have to play an awful lot of games to justfy the outlay!

I know yoyo supports ps3, does it not support Graphics cards as well?

OK, might try to get into this

Would this be compatible, and is it a decent price?

http://www.eurowide-pc.co.uk/asus-256mb ... 30093.html

That's a pretty good price!

However, I think there were some problems with 256MB 8800GT's not being capable of running Cuda 1.1 or 2.0......I can't recall precisely

I would hang fire until the project web site is back and double check.

Reeltime wrote:I know yoyo supports ps3, does it not support Graphics cards as well?

I did have a look for that but I could see no mention of it on the Yoyo site. The CUDA site doesn't seem to mention any Boinc applications other than GPUGrid.

My first WU finished just inside the deadline, running for about 42 hrs, and gave me 3232.06 credit. Not bad for (in my case) three days on one core plus the GPU.

I have been looking at the 9800GT card, with 112 shaders, compared to the 32 in my 8600GTS. Does anyone know how the app scales (assuming the same clock freqencies) with shader numbers? If it scales linearly, that would give me an extra 3k credit per day. Wow, almost as good as Reisel.

Yes, the project scales linearly on GPU power, particularly on shader units.

The 9800GT should be at least 3 times faster than the 8600GT. Maybe even a little faster depending on clock speeds in the card. 8)

I have been looking at the 9800GT card, with 112 shaders

Just buy it. Others have found it okay, c12hr per WU. I bought 2 on ebay last night and can't wait for them to arrive so I can start kicking some bottom!

Just found a new GTX260 for £179 delivered.
Looks like the credit card is getting a bashing again LOL

Silly question, but is this the card you're talking about?

http://www.dinopc.com/shop/pc/NVIDIA-Ge ... 82p417.htm

I was looking at:-

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148064

which seemed to offer most of what I was looking for. It's a few £ more expensive then the one in your URL, but probably exactly the same.

Some very good prices from that supplier. Time for a browse...

Ian

Wierd one.

I had an 8800GT running just fine when an HD went bad, Had to install a new HD. So I re-installed Vista Ultimate, the cuda drivers 2.0, Boinc 6.3.10 just like before. When I attached to PS3 it downloaded the files and proceeded to blow up with this error message.

Cuda error in file 'deviceQuery.cu' in line 59 Initialization error

Any clues? I also posted this to the PS3 forum.

Strange, everythings the same except for the HD which is tthe same model

Is your new Vista installation fully patched? Does it have exactly the same security profile as the previous installation? How about the Boinc install, I gather there have been problems with installing as a service, maybe that's different from the previous install?
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On a different subject, it looks like some strange goings on with the UK Boinc Team account on PS3Grid. Most of their team were removed from the team today and a new UK Boinc Team established - with zero credits

Looking from afar (and admittedly without all the facts) it looks like an attempted team takeover. Apparently, the team founder has not crunched PS3Grid for a few months, so may not have noticed an takeover request.

It's possible, but I'm not certain about this, that if you have your email preferences set not to receive an email for PM's on the project forum, you may not be alerted to the takeover request. Perhaps some of our team founders could tell us if there are any additional controls - do you get an email by default if you receive a team takeover, becasue by default I think PM's are set not to email.

hi chaps

Mind if I park my PS3Grid credits here for a while ?

Think I'll stick them for safe keeping here as well (if there is no complaints that is).

Better then going to a project which has suddenly gone belly up


Ben