Greg,

The machine I'm working on now has more PCie slots, so I'm trying both GTX 770 cards and a Tesla card in the same machine. The Tesla card is 50% faster than the GTX 770 card.

For what activity, out of interest? The 770 is superior to the Tesla in every respect except for total memory size.

Hi Greg,

I don't see what the size of the result file has to do with how useful a project is, as long as the result is not "42".

This was adressed to sis651, wasn't it? Otherwise I would kindly ask you to re-read my post. Regarding the remaining points of project choice: I hope anyone can agree here to disagree, as these discussions often heat up fairly quickly. Personally I obviously have my preferences only strong objections only against a few projects. Most of them give very high credits, though.

Regarding drivers: as far as I know Geforce Experience (as suggested by cowboy2199) is only available under Win. Which makes sense, considering that there are hardly any games for Linux.

How do you know your Tesla is 50% faster? The GFlops you quote there are correct for the C1060 with a maximum throughput of 933 GFlops total SP (with MUL+ADD+SF) or 622 GFlops using only MAD SP. However, the numbers are completely off for the GTX770: it has 3.2 TFlops MAD SP instead of 624 GFlops! Your BOINC and driver are recent, so I have no idea where this number comes from. If it's from the BOINC startup messages it doesn't matter for the actual crunching performance. Also that card and driver are OpenCL 1.1 capable, so I don't know why it's only listed as 1.0. It could be a difference between Win and Linux, as nVidia doesn't like to put any development effort into OpenCL, and surely much less for the few Linux users running OpenCL on nVidia cards.

And finally - sorry, that image link doesn't work.

Best regards,
MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

How did you install this on Ubuntu 14.04 Driver Nvidia 343.22 that is.
Do you have a commands needed for us Window Users.
Thanks

To: ET-Ape,

"DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters"

I'm sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes (or prehensile tail). I wasn't looking to start a fight. Quite the opposite, I was trying to say that there are different views on what are "useful" projects. Even though it's not a project I run tasks for even though it's cool, the RenderFarm was my example of how "frivolous" versus "useful" is a matter of perspective. Listening for ET transmissions is important to me, but considered frivolous to some/many. I'm a huge fan of Douglas Adams writings and was just trying to be humorous with my reference to 42 being the short answer to "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything".

I'm not sure why the link to the picture didn't work. I'm not up to speed with BBCodes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2gn3MG8nZvAMDRWaEhGV0dkMlk/view


To: Matt , et. al.,

As for the the performance of the GTX770's, you all obviously know far more about that I do, which isn't difficult as I'm fairly ignorant on graphics cards. The only computer games I play are GO and Star Trek Armada, so I've never worried about frame rates. My GTX770 cards are generic Chinese imports. They say NVIDIA GeForce GTX770 on the outside, and NVIDIA drivers say they are the GTX770. The number of CUDA cores reported for GTX770 cards is somewhat confusing, as some things refer to the number of shaders cores and others to the the number of texture cores.

The GFLOPs numbers in my message were from the BOINC start up. A few months ago, I did a comparison of wall-time for running some EINSTEIN tasks. The time to completion for a GTX770 card was about 25% longer than the same system with a Telsa card installed instead. As for whether I'm using single or double precision, I don't know which the projects use. Except for an old PCI video card in my file server that uses a GeForce 8400 GS, all of my cards support DP if required, It is a big performance hit when it's needed. One of my first programming jobs (so long ago that double precision would be needed to calculate) was doing actuarial programming in FORTRAN for life insurance companies. To control rounding errors and improve performance on ancient hardware, floating point was avoided whenever possible. Money amounts were always in pennies using unsigned long integers, such as 100,000 for $1000.00.

A comment about the declining number of BOINC volunteers.

Lots of users are giving up their desktop computers as their tablets and phones have more capabilities to take their place by using online resources. I homes that might have had multiple desktop PC, they now may a single desktop to use when they need something more powerful than their touchscreen devices. I don't do any calculations on my Android devices, because it drains the battery too fast. I use the BOINC client portion to attach to other systems on my home network to monitor them, but I don't run any calculations on these devices.

As the the team leader for the BOINC "Starfleet" team, I've seen the number of active users on my team decline to about half what it was 7 years ago, but the work unit production of the team has increased as desktop machines of the remaining users have become more powerful. In the US, we also don't seem to get much press anymore. I used to hear or read a mention of the SETI@Home project periodically in bits about science news. It has been a few years since I've seen anything about BOINC projects outside of BOINC forums or articles about computer clustering.

I'm very sorry if I made anyone angry. I have a sarcastic sense of humor, and I should take more care so as not to cause offense.

Greg

My GTX770 cards are generic Chinese imports.

There's your problem... they aren't actually GTX770's. Einstein is reporting they only have 128 cuda cores.

My GTX770 cards are generic Chinese imports.

There's your problem... they aren't actually GTX770's. Einstein is reporting they only have 128 cuda cores.

Something's wonky: Stderr output:

# Name : GeForce GTX 770
# ECC : Disabled
# Global mem : 2047MB
# Capability : 1.1
# PCI ID : 0000:07:00.0
# Device clock : 1625MHz
# Memory clock : 700MHz
# Memory width : 384bit

Edit, here's a normal GTX770:

# Name : GeForce GTX 770
# ECC : Disabled
# Global mem : 2047MB
# Capability : 3.0
# PCI ID : 0000:01:00.0
# Device clock : 1189MHz
# Memory clock : 3505MHz
# Memory width : 256bit

Greg,

Looking at your computers' work history on GPU grid, I can't see any circumstance where a GPU work unit (called acemdlong) has run on one of your 770s.

The reason for this is that, notwithstanding the branding of the cards, they re reporting as very old silicon, older even than the Tesla.

It's possible that this is a driver problem, perhaps getting confused by the presence of different devices in the same system. A less pleasant alternative is that you have fake cards. This is made more plausible given that you said that Einstein WUs ran slowly on them.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Matt

Everybody,
Thanks for all the info. I was beginning to smell fake last night as I read more specs on the real GTX770s, which is why I mentioned mine were from China (on AliExpress). I guess you get what you pay for at 3 cards for $250. At the time, I needed something faster than the ATI ES1000 graphics on the motherboard with 16MB. When I got them, they were fast enough and cheap enough, so I was happy enough.

After I posted last night, I did a Google search (I can't say Googling, without thinking of Décolletage) for "fake NVIDIA GTX 770". There were lots of discussions regarding cards bought on AliExpress. At least mine isn't as obvious as the one below where they were selling a NVDIA Radeon card by ASUS, which looks like somewhat like my cards other than the ASUS sticker. Mine also has two fans so it must be twice as fast, right?

I am feeling an odd sense of simultaneous stupidity and enlightenment. To paraphrase former Def. Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, at least now I know what I don't know, which is better than not knowing what I don't know. I'm sorry to have inadvertently hijacked this news thread for tech support.

I think perhaps I'll change my name, be quite from now own, and go back to looking for cures for cancer and broadcasts of "I Love Lucy" reruns with Vulcan subtitles (using my CPUs).

Greg Inadvertent Tippitt

Hi Greg,

don't worry, you didn't upset me (and I don't think anyone else) in this thread. If we were this thin-skinned we probably wouldn't post on message boards any more ;)

And I actually meant my "kindly ask" in the true sense of the word. In a laid-back and relaxed way, yet slightly alarmed that you might have misunderstood things (which you didn't).. not some woman-like indirect way of saying "I'm two seconds away from bursting into fury" :D

Regarding your cards: it seems very probable to me that you got fake ones. At 128 shaders they could use the venerable G92 chip, which was used from 9800GT to GTS250 and is one generation earlier than your Teslas. This matches your observed Einstein performance approximately: 128 shader * 1625 MHz is 67% of 240 shaders at 1296 MHz. This would make your Teslas at maximum 33% faster than your "GTX770", which is well within experimental error range of 25% (and like most projects Einstein does scale absolutely linear with shader count and clock speed).

This also explains the OpenCL 1.0 support, as that G92 chip is actually CUDA compute capability 1.1 (1.3 for the Teslas). And why you're getting problems with newer drivers: nVidia has actually discontinued support for those old chips and is only providing some bug fixes in the 340 legacy branch.

I have fond memories of this chip. I actually started with one at GPU-Grid, somewhere in the time frame 2008 - 2009. It was making nice 10k credits/day. I sold that card for 40€ back then, and it's still working in a system of my colleague for the occasional casual game. For todays number crunching it's not really suitable any more, though.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

This is good news indeed.
I think that crunching on pre-Kepler cards (GTX-2xx, GTX-4xx, GTX-5xx) is a waste of electricity.

I disagree :) My GTX560 is crunching fine on short WUs

Not everyone has the bucks to upgrade to something new whenever a new architecture is released, so don't make such remarks

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Team Belgium

In fact I'm trying new projects, checking for run times and the credit they give. File size was a thing just received my attention when crunching, not a proof of a bad project. I read many things about usefulness of those projects and don't feel perfect with Collatz but anyway it's one of those projects.
I ran Einstein@home and it's on the list, loved the CPU job graphics. But my priority is projects about health and medical issues. I was planning to switch Poem@home but they don't seem to have those OpenCL works there.
Now checked again and Boinc receives CUDA42 Noelia jobs, so I continue them.

Nvidia have never oficially supported their Optimus products on Linux. Anyway Bumblebee is fine for normal usage but not for crunching. Also drivers downloaded from Nvidia site work and crunch fine but I can't switch to integrated graphics on them. In this area we have frequent blackouts. And to Optimus or not Optimus means two hours of difference between the notebook battery life...

Sorry for causing some annoyance here. :)

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sis651,
Regarding POEM@Home, the availability their GPU work is sort of hit or miss, It doesn't run that well on GPUs as some others projects either. I think their code is maybe better suited to CPUs. Their GPU tasks also require a full CPU core while running. The difference in speed for running CPU vs GPU tasks for POEM is not as great as with other projects like SETI AstroPulse, so I run CPU work for POEM and use my GPUs elsewhere. You run almost exactly the same projects as I do.


Matt and ET-Ape,
This weekend, I snagged a pair of used NVIDIA 670 cards (real ones) on ebay for $250. They're not as fast as Titans, but as bottom-feeding goes, I'm happy. The StdOut from BOINC shows the numbers from my "funny 770", which explains why I thought my Telsa cards were so fast. The fake 770's were the first CUDA GPUs I had ever bought, so I thought the old Tesla cards seemed really fast by comparison. ("So it not a Greyhound, it's a Basset Hound? I always wondered why his legs were so short.") When I've had a chance to move the older cards to another machine, I can then upgrade my drivers to 343 for the machine with the two (real) 670s. In the meantime, I wonder how many workunits I can finish per day with this machine's 4 GPUs and 24 CPU cores.


GPU 0: GeForce GTX 670...... 2048MB - 2915 GFLOPS

GPU 1: Tesla T10 Processor.. 4096MB - 933 GFLOPS

GPU 2: GeForce GTX 770...... 2048MB - 624 GFLOPS

GPU 3: GeForce GTX 670...... 2048MB - 2915 GFLOPS


There is a listing on eBay with lots of bids for a fake 770 like mine. The NVIDIA driver and settings program report that the card is a GTX 770. The clue is the 128 CUDA cores. Well there is also the matter of it not looking like a 770, I guess.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/231383397036?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Well, so much for my promise to be quiet from now on...

Greg Tippitt
BOINC Team Leader for
STARFLEET - Star Trek Fan Association

I am using driver 334.89. NVIDIA tells me this is the latest driver for my two GTX 650Ti GPUs.

Not being particularly tech savvy, I can't do any more. Not sure what effect, if any, this will have on my ability to process after 1 January 2015.

John

Damm you lot and your ARMS race. You have just forced me to upgrade again to Asus GTX970 and use my Asus GTX660TI to replace old GTX460.

Only leaves GTX560TI to replace.

I am using driver 334.89. NVIDIA tells me this is the latest driver for my two GTX 650Ti GPUs.

Not being particularly tech savvy, I can't do any more. Not sure what effect, if any, this will have on my ability to process after 1 January 2015.

John

John,

You'll find the latest NVidia drivers (344.65) for your GTX650Ti for Windows 7 x64 on this page.

This is a direct link to the executable installer:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/344.65/344.65-desktop-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe

EDIT: eXaPower linked these drivers on the other thread, but I leave this post here if someone gets here first, just like I did.

Damm you lot and your ARMS race. You have just forced me to upgrade again to Asus GTX970 and use my Asus GTX660TI to replace old GTX460.

Only leaves GTX560TI to replace.

Is this a joke? The 1st post explicitly says "Series 200", which does not apply to a GTX460 from the "Series 400". So actually nVidia "forced" you to upgrade by providing a new, superior product ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Yes, it was meant to be a joke

ET-Ape,
We realize that Vulcans have difficulties with the humour of humans',but you could use logic and language syntax to help you with the recognition of irony and sarcasm.

Peace and long life,
Greg

Ahhh, well at least I got a good laugh reading this thread's misunderstood sarcasm... :D

Also, sorry to hear about the fake cards.

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Haha! Yeah, sorry, I should have gotten it. At least I was suspecious that the sarcasm-module of my tricorder hadn't triggered properly ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002