I was planning out a new computer, a Maingear F131, with the express purpose of crunching GPUgrid. I already have a machine, a Maingear Shift Super Stock with Nvidia GTX 670's. For whatever reason, GPUGrid did not do well on this machine. I had to detach from the project.

This machine kept failing. It was totally rebuilt three times, and what finally seems to have settled things down has been the removal of GPUGrid. Why this was a problem I have no idea. GPUGrid was the impetus for this machine. The machine is currently doing GPU crunching on EINSTEIN and SETI so far with no difficulties.

Maybe various GPU projects just do not play well together.

So, I wanted to plan the new machine with ATI cards. Apparently, GPUGrid does not run on any ATI cards.

Am I correct about that, and is there any hope for the future?
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It is still technically possible to do OpenCL but it does require a lot of work. Only justified if AMD really brings a top card in.

O.K., now I know the score on ATI.

So, I could go the other way: I could run GPUGrid as the only GPU project on the current machine, and run the others, EINSTEIN, SETI, and add MILKY WAY, on a machine with ATI.

But, there remains the question, part of which I posed above: is there any reason that GPUGrip would create difficulties on any machine with decent Nvidia cards when it is the lone GPU project? After all, before I finally quit the project, it amassed 17 million credits.

As I said above, this machine was rebuilt three times suspecting other problems than problems caused by any one project. It only calmed down once GPUGrid was no longer running.
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MrS

Thanks. I did run HW Monitor for a while. It never showed anything untoward regarding GPU temps. My power supply never failed, I was always able to get something to happen on failures, even if the machine refused to boot.

And, you know, I did manage 17 million credits on GPUGrid before I gave it up.

My GPU's are GTX 670's, air cooled. We tried sealed liquid coolers, but they repeatedly failed.

Even if the GPU's did overheat, I would think that would have initiated a shutdown of the crunching before actual damage to the cards. I believe that is what happens when CPU's overheat, a machine will shut down prior to damage.
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So, I guess what I would request is, what would be considered good Nvidia cards to put on a new machine, and what in the way of specifications for a power supply?

Here is what the Maingear F131 Super Stock would have
Intel® Core™ i7 3930K Six-core 3.2GHz/3.8GHz Turbo 12MB L3 Cache w/ HyperThreading.

MAINGEAR EPIC 120 Supercooler (CPU cooling)- but that looks like a water cooled system and I have had bad luck with that, so I would ask for air cooling similar to what I have on the Shift Super Stock.

Intel® Turbo Boost Advanced Automatic Overclocking

16GB Corsair® Dominator™ Platinum DDR3-1600 Extremely Low Latency 1.5V (4x4GB).

The choices of Nvidia cards are way too plentiful

2x EVGA® GeForce™ GTX 680 SuperClocked 4GB Total GDDR5 In SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST - OC]
2x EVGA® GeForce™ GTX 680 FTW+ 8GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 680 4GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x EVGA® GeForce™ GTX 670 8GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 670 4GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x MSI® GeForce™ GTX 660 Ti Power Edition 4GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 660 Ti 4GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]
2x NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 660 4GB Total GDDR5 in SLI w/PhysX [ENTHUSIAST]



The SLI can be disabled, but since BOINC wants device 0 and Maingear wants device 0, I have SLI enabled on the Shift Super Stock. If either was O.K. with device 1, then I would not be doing this.

1TB Western Digital VelociRaptor SATA 6G 10,000rpm 64MB Cache
This was actually the last change made on the Shift Super Stock. This is alleged to be an "enterprise grade" (whatever that means) hard drive normally used in servers.

Power supplies available are
850 Watt Corsair® AX850 80+ Gold Certified Modular Power Supply ROHS
660 Watt Seasonic® X-660 80+ Gold Certified Modular Power Supply ROHS

So, this is a lot to ask, but I find people here really know their stuff.

Any opinions, and I know they could only be seen as opinions, will be gladly received. I am not about the business of building any machine myself. I am only about the business of paying for what works.

Thanks in advance for any and all replies.







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Did you have SLI enabled on you're last rig with all the problems? If so, that may have caused all you're problems, it must be disabled to crunch WU's on GPU Grid. I'm thinking you already knew that though.

flashawk-

We actually ran it both ways. In fact, with GPUGrid in the mix, we ran SLI, we ran two cards, we ran BOINC on Dev 0 only, Dev 1 only, we really tried everything, through two builds actually, and had a lot of success which was in both cases only temporary. The only thing that was not done was to connect the monitor to Dev 1. The builder was adamant that monitor be on Dev 0. The first build ran successfully for about ninety days, the second build for about 60 days, both running GPUGrid, each with SLI enabled and this disabled. The worst was SLI disabled and BOINC ignoring Dev 1, so that both BOINC and the rest of the computer were using Dev 0. I am sure that I said earlier, I was told that BOINC wants to be on Dev 0.

The way it looks now, I am not going to change anything on the Shift Super Stock. Of course, as soon as I post this, I may eat my words. But, up until now, with SLI enabled, and thus running BOINC and the rest of the machine on what looks like Dev 0, running SETI and Einstein GPU WU's, plus a bunch of CPU only projects, everything is stable.

And, this machine does nothing else. It was purchased with the express intent of running BOINC projects but with a focus on GPU work. My colleague has done the same thing, a Maingear F131 that all it does is crunch (that is an older style F131, the case is more standard and so GPU work can be questionable. Also, my colleague only runs WCG and he is on the WCG build of BOINC 6.10.58, still the standard at WCG). You know, we are talking about a lot of money devoted to this work.

If I can get some good advice on what to put on the F131, then I will run GPUGrid on that machine. If not, then I will run Einstein, SETI, and a bunch of CPU only projects.

One way or the other, the machine will be purchased. It will replace my oldest desktop, an i7-920 that is about 3-1/2 years old. It is apparently now accepted as a fact that i7's run hot. The topic is not new, but it has only recently been dealt with in any meaningful way with tthrottle to control temperature. This i7-920 ran BOINC at 100%/100% for along time with temperatures in the 90's C. Now, we know that is abusive. All of my machines are now controlled for CPU with tthrottle. So, this CPU is old before its time. There is work which is failing to finish, runt times that are ridiculous. I could have the CPU changed out, but it's like a car: what might be next.

I want to get this settled very soon. I can still get Win 7; but I do not know how much longer that will be possible.
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You got GPU Grid to run on only one card at a time? Did you do the .xml file with

<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>

That's what I had to do to get it to run on both GPU's at the same time, look here in the first post.

http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=2123&nowrap=true#16463

You're hardware looks good, I prefer Seasonic PSU's but 660 seems weak, go for the Corsair 850, there very good PSU's too.
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So, this CPU is old before its time. There is work which is failing to finish, runt times that are ridiculous. I could have the CPU changed out, but it's like a car: what might be next.

I can still get Win 7; but I do not know how much longer that will be possible.

@Richard (mitrichr)

You've been a good friend and you always will be. I apologize for being so harsh but my *best* friends on my list of friends are the ones who kick me in the butt when I'm a dummy. Obviously I get kicked a lot! So if I'm harsh and kicking your butt it's not because I don't like you it's because I know you can do better and I don't want to see you fail.

BOINC doesn't insist on running on GPU 0, it's rather that it can only use the GPUs which are not set to sleep by windows. And any non-SLI-ed GPU without a monitor attached and without the desktop extended to it is considered useless by Win and sent to sleep to save power. It's a shame it can't be waken up for GP-GPU work then. That's why you only crunched on 1 GPU with SLI disabled and the monitor disconnected.

A 660 Watt Power Supply is to les for two nVidia high-end cards, I found out myself.
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Greetings from TJ

MrS-

Thanks for taking so much time to look at my issues.

The i7-920 machine will go into the shop to have the CPU looked at. Either new thermal paste will be done, or if necessary and if possible a replacement, unless the cost is too high. Also, I will ask about better cooling.

Regarding Dagorath, he is just a nasty harsh mean-spirited Canuck who should move to Florida. He does not even like Hockey.

TJ-

Very interesting about the power supply. The Shift Super Stock has a 1000 watt unit.

skgiven-

Thanks also for your comments.

I have to say, I went into GPU crunching with very little knowledge, looking especially for the GPUGrid project. I am surprised I have gotten this far with GPU work. GPUGrid is very demanding; Milky Way requires DP cards, yet ATI is not all that popular. This field is still in its infancy.
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Regarding Dagorath, he is just a nasty harsh mean-spirited Canuck who should move to Florida. He does not even like Hockey.

After reading through all of this, it seems to me that there should be somewhere on the web site a statement of the minimum requirements to safely and successfully run WU's on this project. Specifically, cards, power supply, CPU, DRAM, maybe cooling.

As I revealed, I have a very expensive and powerful computer which managed to work up 17 million credits, but which had to be rebuilt three times. That is a very costly situation, definitely to be avoided if possible.
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As I revealed, I have a very expensive and powerful computer which managed to work up 17 million credits, but which had to be rebuilt three times. That is a very costly situation, definitely to be avoided if possible.

hi,
no big hopes for ATI. The old code which run OpenCL has been deprecated for a new one which is now cuda only. It is still technically possible to do OpenCL but it does require a lot of work. Only justified if AMD really brings a top card in.



gdf

O.K., now I know the score on ATI.

So, I could go the other way: I could run GPUGrid as the only GPU project on the current machine, and run the others, EINSTEIN, SETI, and add MILKY WAY, on a machine with ATI.

WGC/HCC will be out of work in less than four months, and I don't know of any new projects that will be using GPUs at all.

POEM has only enough work to dribble out a few work units to each user, and even worse, when HCC ends a lot of those people will move over to POEM. So there is no net gain in work done, only dividing the present work among more people.

The fact is that if you are interested in biomedical research, your only real option is Nvidia for the foreseeable future. (Folding may have an improved AMD core out eventually, though Nvidia will probably still be better.)

hi,
no big hopes for ATI. The old code which run OpenCL has been deprecated for a new one which is now cuda only. It is still technically possible to do OpenCL but it does require a lot of work. Only justified if AMD really brings a top card in.



gdf

or better, is gpugrid willing to break from the nVidia contract?
but what i know, just my 2 cents.

While I am not affiliated with GPU Grid I think it has to do with the fact that the GPU Grid code is best suited to CUDA enabled projects which out perform OpenCL out of the box, without custom tailoring settings to optimize OpenCL settings which only just then become comparable to the CUDA set up.

I have not done much more reading into CUDA vs. OpenCL besides that, but depending on the types of tasks needed, and the way the code is implemented they will preform various tasks at varying proficiencies. Some projects are best suited for OpenCL while others are best suited for CUDA. That does not change the fact that if you want to get the most out of a card without needing to tinker with setting to optimize it for a given task, CUDA is always better.


I hate that quite a few people get on this forum and think GPU Grid has some sort of Vendetta against AMD cards. As an academic that understands the time crunch imposed on the researchers, I know that for such a small crew, running off a relatively tight budget ( face it next to no educational institution throws a lot of money towards supporting any project like this, and most institutions are relatively tight with their budgets as they would rather grow their endowment), but they made a decision some years ago that CUDA better suited their needs so they scrapped the OpenCL code because it was becoming too much of a headache to maintain. Yet so many people treat these projects like they are not there to help the projects out, but rather the projects are there to serve their users every need. I honestly find it sick and twisted.
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Before anybody accuses me of having a contract with nVIDIA be aware that I just took delivery of an AMD 7970, it's installed in host 154485@POEM.

This notion that CUDA is better suited for complex data analysis and modeling than OpenCL is widely reported on the 'net. skgiven isn't just making that up because he has a contract with nVIDIA, it's generally accepted as fact. I've seen it reported in several different places and have never seen anybody dispute it.

I would love to see GPUgrid support my sexxy new 7970 but I don't think it's a wise thing for them to do, at this point in time. Supporting CUDA alone is using up a lot of their development time and from reports in the News section CUDA is getting them all the data they can handle.
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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

POEM; 7970 + Athlon X2 ?
Waste of GPU power. PM me - i will tell You what's goin on with POEM on GPU. (till tomorow - later on no internet for 10 days).
BTW - owners of AMD GPU can support GPUGrid with Donate@home. I must think about as distrrgen started to make me angry.

This notion that CUDA is better suited for complex data analysis and modeling than OpenCL is widely reported on the 'net. skgiven isn't just making that up because he has a contract with nVIDIA, it's generally accepted as fact. I've seen it reported in several different places and have never seen anybody dispute it.

My statement summarizes the current state of affairs, yours holds open future possibilities so I think yours is a better way to put it except, lol, many readers can't appreciate what maturity has to do with a programming platform. I see the possibility that OpenCL might one day be just as capable as CUDA but I think that will be difficult to accomplish due to the fact that it's trying to work with 2 different machine architectures. As you say, time will tell. Amazing things can happen when the right combination of talent, money and motivation are brought to bear on a problem. I could be wrong (I don't read the markets as well or as regularly as many do) but I think sales are brisk for AMD as well as nVIDIA so the money is probably there but it depends on how much of that the shareholders want to siphon off into their pockets and how much they want to plow back into development.

____________
BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

My statement summarizes the current state of affairs, yours holds open future possibilities so I think yours is a better way to put it except, lol, many readers can't appreciate what maturity has to do with a programming platform. I see the possibility that OpenCL might one day be just as capable as CUDA but I think that will be difficult to accomplish due to the fact that it's trying to work with 2 different machine architectures. As you say, time will tell.

Amazing things can happen when the right combination of talent, money and motivation are brought to bear on a problem. I could be wrong (I don't read the markets as well or as regularly as many do) but I think sales are brisk for AMD as well as nVIDIA so the money is probably there but it depends on how much of that the shareholders want to siphon off into their pockets and how much they want to plow back into development.

...competition drives technological advancement.

That's a pretty impressive list of things people think OpenCL is good for. I won't disagree with them because my expertise on the subject is stretched even at this point. I guess my impression is that it's kind of like a Swiss army knife. They're pretty cool looking things and one thinks there is no job it can't do but the fact is they really don't work that well. Or those screwdrivers that have 15 interchangeable bits stashed in the handle. They're compact and take up a lot less room than 15 screwdrivers but if you look in a mechanic's tool chest you won't find one. They hate them and if you give them one they'll toss it in the trash bin. And so OpenCL maybe does a lot of different things but does it do any of those things well? I honestly don't know, I don't work with it, just an enduser.

Btw, the SAT@home project announced testing of their new GPU app in this thread. It's CUDA so it seems they don't think much of OpenCL either.

You're right about the benefits of competition. Perhaps after a few years of competition and maturation OpenCL will push CUDA out.

____________
BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

...competition drives technological advancement.

While I don't doubt this statement, I think that better and better (GPU-based) supercomputers will be built whether there is or isn't competition in the (GP)GPU industry.

Moreover the GPU based products made for gaming purposes become less and less important (i.e. profitable) along the way.

If there is a demand for it someone will build a better supercomputer even if they have to use current tech. Seems to me one way to accomplish it would be to build a bigger box to house it then jam more of the current generation of processors into it. Or does it not work that way?

Why less profitable... market saturation?

...competition drives technological advancement.

While I don't doubt this statement, I think that better and better (GPU-based) supercomputers will be built whether there is or isn't competition in the (GP)GPU industry. Moreover the GPU based products made for gaming purposes become less and less important (i.e. profitable) along the way.

...competition drives technological advancement.

While I don't doubt this statement, I think that better and better (GPU-based) supercomputers will be built whether there is or isn't competition in the (GP)GPU industry. Moreover the GPU based products made for gaming purposes become less and less important (i.e. profitable) along the way.

With more than one competitor GPUs will obviously progress far faster than in a monopolistic scenario. We've seen technology stagnate more than once when competition was lacking. I could name a few if you like. Been building and upgrading PCs for a long, long time. Started with the Apple, then Zilog Z80 based CPM machines and then the good old 8088 and 8086 CPUs...

There are exceptions to everything, including the statement "competition drives technological advancement".

One example however where this is true is the 600 series GPU's by nvidia. There are rumors that say that the current 680 is actual the 660 that nvidia had planned out, however there wasn't anything to compete with the 680 they had originally planned, so they didn't release it and instead rebranded the 660 to a 680, which happened to be close in performance to AMD's 7970, and then made a whole new 600 series line based off of the planned 660, now current 680.

Furthermore, it is speculated now that nvidia is finally releasing the planned 680 as the Geforce Titan.

Whether these rumors are true or not, it still shows how without competition (in this case, an equivalent AMD card to nvidia's planned 680) nvidia didn't release what they had planned, and instead gave out a lesser performing card for the price of a higher-end one, and saved the extreme performing card (the Titan) for later.

In addition, less people will have the Titan because it is $900 versus the current 680, which is $500, however if AMD did have a more powerful card, nvidia would have had to put out the Titan as the 680 a while ago to compete. In other words, if there was some competition, nvidia would have given a more powerful card, a better piece of technology, for less versus the current 680.


I hope this story made sense, as I was typing it out, I felt that one could get confusing reading it. If one wants more information on these rumors, a Google search of something like "680 actually 660 rumor" to get something like this:


http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2234396

Retvari,

Yes, I had some trouble with that word you used... "better". Thanks for defining it. And thanks to you and skgiven for filling me in on the details concerning what's been going on in the marketplace regarding nVIDIA's supplying GPUs for supercomputers. I knew they were supplying them but I didn't see the rest of the puzzle until now. It all starts to make so much more sense now and once again I say "if you don't know history you can't truly appreciate where you are today and will likely have trouble choosing a wise path to your future".

So now a question.... I read recently that nVIDIA purposely disabled 64bit floating point ops to protect their high end models. Now that I realize what we're getting on these consumer cards is chips leftover from sales for supercomputers I am beginning to think that maybe what really happened is that these chips were ones that the 64 bit ops did not work on (manufacturing defects due to contaminants and what not) or did not work reliably which meant they did not meet the contracted specs for the supercomputers so they've taken those and made sure the 64bit does not work at all and marketed them as video cards. Similar to when part of the intended cache on an i7 doesn't work reliably they can sometimes excise/disable that portion while leaving the remainder functional. Then they sell it as a model with smaller cache at a lower price. Is that what's happened with the 64 bit ops on nVIDIA cards?


____________
BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Neverone to pass up the opportunity for a little brinksmanship or perhaps just the opportunity to reminisce, my first one was a Heath kit a friend and I soldered together with an iron I used as a child to do woodburning, that and solder the size plumber's use. No temperature control on the iron, I took it to uncle who ground the tip down to a decent size on his bench grinder. We didn't have a clue in the beginning and I wish I could say we learned fast but we didn't. It yielded an early version of the original Apple Wozniak and friends built in... ummm...whose garage was it... Jobs'? Built it, took 2 months to fix all the garbage soldering and debug it but finally it worked. After that several different models of Radio Shack's 6809 based Color Computer, the first with 16K RAM and a cassette tape recorder for storage and the last with 1 MB RAM I built myself and an HD interface a friend designed and had built in a small board jobber in Toronto. He earned an article in PC mag for that, it was a right piece of work. That gave me 25 MB storage and was a huge step up from the 4 drive floppy array I had been using. It used OS/9 operating system (Tandy's OS/9 not a Mac thing), not as nice as CPM but multi-tasking and multi-user. Friends running 8088/86 systems were amazed. And it had a bus connector and parallel port we used and for which we built tons of gizmos, everything from home security systems to engine analyzers. All with no IRQ lines on the 6809, lol.

Win2.x and 3.1 was useless to me since my little CoCo NEVER crashed and did everything Win on a '286 could do including run a FidoNet node, Maximus BBS plus BinkleyTerm. Then the bomb went off... Gates publicly declared the '286 was braindead, IBM called in their option on OS/2, the rooftop party in Redmond, OS/2 being the first stable multitasking GUI OS to run on a PC and it evolving fairly quickly into a 16 bit OS while Win did nothing but stay 8 bit and crash a lot. Ran OS/2 on a '386 I OC'd and built a water cooling system for through the '486 years then a brief dalliance with Win98 on my first Pentium which made me puke repeatedly after rock solid OS/2 and genuine 16 bitness, CPM and OS/9 so on to Linux which I've never regretted for a minute.

Gates was the last man standing, no competition. And that is why Windows is such a piece of sh*t. What other examples do you know of?

Oh yah, I'm older than dirt. I remember back when dirt first came out, you know dirt was clean back then.

A 4 line BBS was impressive in those days and would have been impossible on one machine without OS/2. As far as I remember the only guys running that many lines on DOS or Win were using one machine per line. At its zenith mine was fed via satellite downlink on sideband through a C band TV receiver. Uplink was dialup through the local fido hub. There were maybe 75 of us doing the sat downlink thing in North America (it wasn't available in Europe or the southern hemisphere) and everybody except me and one other OS/2 user needed a separate machine just to handle the data off the sat. They used Chuck Forsburg's gz to fire the data out the parallel port and over to the machine the BBS ran on. Ethernet just wasn't popular amongst the hobbyists back then. For me it all ran on 1 machine stable as a rock under OS/2. But OS/2 was Big Blue and everybody loved to hate Big Blue so they wouldn't buy in.

Competition drives technology...

Is that what's happened with the 64 bit ops on nVIDIA cards?

In short: no.

...competition drives technological advancement.

While I don't doubt this statement, I think that better and better (GPU-based) supercomputers will be built whether there is or isn't competition in the (GP)GPU industry. Moreover the GPU based products made for gaming purposes become less and less important (i.e. profitable) along the way.

With more than one competitor GPUs will obviously progress far faster than in a monopolistic scenario.

We've seen technology stagnate more than once when competition was lacking. I could name a few if you like. Been building and upgrading PCs for a long, long time. Started with the Apple, then Zilog Z80 based CPM machines and then the good old 8088 and 8086 CPUs...

i think this will help you settle your psu issue and
http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell/tool/psucalc/index.html?name=Power-Supply-Wattage-Calculator
CPU: Intel Core I7(lga2011)
Motherboard: High-end Desktop Motherboard
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 x2
Memory: 4GB DDR3 x4
Optical Drive: Combo x1
Hard Drive: 10,000RPM 3.5" HDD x1

Total wattage: 809 Watts

and with oc i wouldnt go less than the 850 which in my opinion is already pushing it. I would go to a 900 watt and you could build that same computer yourself for $3500 so if you were budgeting 5k you would have much room for improvement.

Also a closed loop liquid cooler usually never has problems, most on the market except a few are made by asetek and just rebadged as another brand. (AMD, Antec, ASUS, Corsair, ELSA, NZXT, Thermaltake, and Zalman) which is cheeper to just go through the manufacturer yourself.

and if you stick to air cooling try using Open Hardware Monitor to ramp up your nvidia fans to keep them cool. I use it to keep my GTX570 at full load under 70c at all times. when i didnt enable manual fan control and let the card do its thing it would peak at 92c under full load. and depending on how loud i want my computer i can choose to keep it at 57c full load with ambient air temp of 32c.

I'm a former GPUGrid cruncher who just wanted to add my voice to those supporting OpenCL use here.

I got rid of my nVidia cards due to many of the newer AMDs having such good electrical efficiency. I've been supporting GPUGrid through donate@home, but making bitcoins isn't quite the same as doing scientific research, and only a limited number of bitcoins can be made, so donate's appeal diminishes over time. Maybe some of the fellowships funded by donate could be used to port GPUGrid to OpenCL before the bitcoins run out altogether?

I just think GPUGrid's missing out, and wish the project would do something about it. It was my original card crunching project, and if there stops being any reasonable way for me to crunch for it, even indirectly, I'm gonna be bummed. Not bummed enough to spend $1000 replacing my cards with nVidias, but bummed nonetheless.

I'm a former GPUGrid cruncher who just wanted to add my voice to those supporting OpenCL use here.

I got rid of my nVidia cards due to many of the newer AMDs having such good electrical efficiency.

I'm a former GPUGrid cruncher who just wanted to add my voice to those supporting OpenCL use here.

I got rid of my nVidia cards due to many of the newer AMDs having such good electrical efficiency.

If you have an HD 7000 series card, then you are in luck on Folding@home. Their new Core_17 (currently in beta testing) does better on AMD than Nvidia, and improvements are still being made. Not only is the PPD better, but the CPU usage is comparably low, which is unusual for OpenCL. Note however that the higher-end cards do much better than the low-end cards, due to their quick-return bonus (QRB).

You can wait for the release, or try out the betas by setting a flag in the FAHClient to get them. CUDA has long reigned supreme over there, and so it is quite a change. Note however that you have to log in to their forums to see the beta testing section, which is at the bottom of the page. And you will need to check the Wiki to see how to set the beta flag. Given the amount of development required to get OpenCL to work properly (they have been at it for years), that will get you results far faster than waiting for GPUGrid to do it.

John,

Folding does not give out implementation dates, as a matter of policy. But they first started a closed beta (only to registered beta testers who had a key) a couple of months ago, and now have moved to open beta, meaning anyone can do it. But still only the registered beta testers get help if it crashes. I am not a registered beta tester, but it has worked fine on my HD 7770 for several days now and I don't see many problems in the forums (except for the predictable ones from overclocking; don't do it, especially in a beta test).

Next, they move to the "advanced" stage, meaning it is out of beta and anyone can get it if they set an "advanced" flag (and get help if they need it). Finally, the do a full release, and anyone gets it, at least if they have an AMD card; I don't know if they will give it to the Nvidia crowd, who may stay on the present Core_15 for some time longer.

They are still making changes and speed improvements:
http://folding.typepad.com/news/2013/03/sneak-peak-at-openmm-51-about-2x-increase-in-ppd-for-gpu-core-17.html
So I don't know when it will get out of beta, but I would expect in a month or two. And then another month or two of Advanced. If that sounds like fun to you, give it a try; otherwise just wait for the formal release, which I assume will be by the latter part of the summer.

To date NVidia is stuck on OpenCL 1.1, even though the GTX600 series cards are supposedly OpenCL1.2 capable. They haven't bothered to support 1.2 with drivers. I was hoping that the arival of the Titan would prompt NVidia to start supporting 1.2 but it hasn't happened so far. Perhaps the official HD 7990's will encourage NVidia to support OpenCL1.2, given AMD's embarrassingly superior OpenCL compute capabilities.

Conversely, AMD has made great strides in OpenCL for their 7xxx series cards. On the WCG OpenCL app even the lowly HD 7770 is twice as fast as as an HD 5850 that uses twice the power, so 4x greater efficiency. At the Open_CL Einstein, the GTX 660 is faster than the 660 TI. In fact the 560 TI is faster than the 660 TI. Seems strange?

Edit: I won't even mention that at Einstein the Titan runs at only 75% of the speed of the HD 7970, which is well under 1/2 the price. Oops, mentioned it...

While I like AMD GPUs and especially the "new" GCN architecture, I think this goes too far.

MrS

Latest discussions at Einstein made it necessary te recheck my sight of things.
The performance chart I was referring showes the performance with cuda32 apps.

Alex, the reason for Einstein using CUDA32 (according to Bernd) is:

"Our BRP application triggers a bug in CUDA versions 4 & 5 that has been reported to NVida. The bug was confirmed but not fixed yet. Until it has, we're stuck with CUDA 3."

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=10028&nowrap=true#123838

He goes on to say they reported the bug to NVidia 2.5 years ago. Still not fixed. Glad we didn't hold our breath...

I have no way to compare the performance of cuda 4x wu's against AMD OpenCL. But with this (for me) new information I have a feeling of some kind of unfairness compairing cuda3x against newest AMD OpenCL. This is what I wanted to point out.

Im (im)patiently waiting for GPUgrid to get their app working so I can bring my 780 here. Currently it is at Einstein. While I love the project, for what it is, the fact that they're effectively stuck on an older CUDA platform, thus not getting the most they can out of the newer cards makes me not want to crunch there.

It's most definitely a GCN world over there. Yes, you can crunch just fine there with NVIDIA GPUs, just don't expect any performance increases through different app updates.

If it weren't for GPUgrid, I would probably have an ATI rig. I still want to build one, problem is, I like building high end machines. I would rather all my resources go hear. :P

Different cards for different purposes I suppose is what it really all boils down to though. And there's nothing wrong with that.

We ended up designing and building our own GPU chassis so tired of having poor cooling.