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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU & CPU Allocation

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Profile The Gas Giant
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Message 2922 - Posted: 9 Oct 2008 | 18:50:46 UTC

I am currently running the ncpu+1 'work around' to keep my cpu's busy all the time on my Q9450 under XP. I do not believe I have seen a 'slow' down in my GPU crunching time or the other projects I run.

Are there any plans to allocate just the gpu to PS3Grid crunching in the near future?

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Profile Krunchin-Keith [USA]
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Message 2924 - Posted: 9 Oct 2008 | 19:12:02 UTC - in response to Message 2922.

I am currently running the ncpu+1 'work around' to keep my cpu's busy all the time on my Q9450 under XP. I do not believe I have seen a 'slow' down in my GPU crunching time or the other projects I run.

Are there any plans to allocate just the gpu to PS3Grid crunching in the near future?

Live long and BOINC!

I do not know your answer.

But I wanted to add to your comment.

I've been running with ncpus+1 for the last 2 days, I ran for 2 days without it first. Both methods with 6.3.14. On my P4-HT's, so I'mm running 3 now. I too have not seen any (or very little) interferance from running this way. I'm not so much concerned with the crunching, but with pauses in waht I do, I can't be waiting a few seconds of every minute for the cursor to return to the screen so I can go on typing. I do not see that now.

I haven't actually looked at result times yet, I'm just going by operator (me) experience.

One thing to note, last Friday I was still on 6.3.10 with no ncpus modification, the project set the CPU value to something less than 1 so I was running 2 CPU tasks plus the CPU/CUDA task (total 3). At that time I noticed periodic and frequent lags in my work which was causing me problems. I had to suspend some work after a while so I could work uninturupted.

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Message 2931 - Posted: 9 Oct 2008 | 22:13:49 UTC

Gas Giant, your 9600GT is relatively slow, therefore you don't notice the speed drop as much as other user under windows. For you it's probably fine to use ncpus+1.

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Profile The Gas Giant
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Message 2944 - Posted: 10 Oct 2008 | 3:42:09 UTC

Would it be possible to make this a preference that can be selected or de-selected?

Profile Stefan Ledwina
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Message 2945 - Posted: 10 Oct 2008 | 7:22:32 UTC - in response to Message 2944.

Would it be possible to make this a preference that can be selected or de-selected?


I think something like that is in the works...
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Profile Krunchin-Keith [USA]
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Message 3069 - Posted: 15 Oct 2008 | 20:36:56 UTC - in response to Message 2922.

I am currently running the ncpu+1 'work around' to keep my cpu's busy all the time on my Q9450 under XP. I do not believe I have seen a 'slow' down in my GPU crunching time or the other projects I run.

Are there any plans to allocate just the gpu to PS3Grid crunching in the near future?

Live long and BOINC!

Yes. The hold up has been a cleint that properly handles the settings/scheduling. We are getting closer to this with each release. 6.3.14 does not do so well with some small glitches that sometimes do not reschedule work. I'm waiting to test the next release and upon doing so will let you know if it works better.

Users will need to stop using the ncpus+1 debug option when this is put into practice, othewise they will end up with 1 more CPU only job running than they have CPU's, thus slowing down all cpu jobs.

Newer clients 6.3.15 and up will have better handling and scheduling of CPU/GPU jobs. Improvments are under way.

for 6.3.15:
The current scheduler will always run a GPU job if the host has one.
So these jobs are always high priority regardless of their deadline.
Resource share is enforced by work fetch.
If a GPU projects has been getting way more than its share of resources,
the client won't get new jobs from it for a while.

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Message 3076 - Posted: 16 Oct 2008 | 18:18:30 UTC

As a BOINC alpha tester for many years, I thought any new release would be released to the alpha test group for testing. Is there a separate group of testers that are considered alpha testers?

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Message 3077 - Posted: 16 Oct 2008 | 20:10:30 UTC - in response to Message 3076.

Well the GPU clients before 6.3.14 have not been sent to the alpha test group as most did not have GPUs.

There is a group of two users that test applications for Gianni. We report directly to Gianni via email, we are the GPUGRID alpha testers. Stefan does mostly linux testing and I do windows testing.

So versions before 6.3.14 were released to Gianni, Stefan and myself. Once we tested them Gianni would put a link on this project. But most were not run by the regular alpha testers group.

There are those users that know wehre to find new builds, and will blindly run them not knowning why it is even there. Just becasse it has a higher version number does not mean it is a better version. They jsut run them and are not concerned with testing, or providing test feedback.

I have been helping test the cpu/gpu scheduler in BOINC for functions and report directly to David on that providing debug information. Other features of the clients I do not really test at this time, or if I do stumpbe on something broke, it is reported on the alpha test page and email list. 6.3.14 was the first of the 6.3.xx actually released on the alpha test list for alpha testers.

When the next one is made, It is suppose to be for me to pre-test certain scheduler issues before release is announced. This is a special case. Since I have done extensive testing on the 6.3.XX series and 6.3.14 client and know what is not exactly right yet, I know what to look for to see if in fact it was actually fixed. After awhile of running it if fixed it probably will be released in alpha as 6.3.14 was, depends on how quickly I can identiy bugs and/or fixes (hopefully fixes), there are quite a few combinations of cpu and gpu jobs to try and be sure it properly runs what it should.

I get info about fixes directly and also they are logged in the wiki timeline and trac.

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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : GPU & CPU Allocation

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