It's definitely going to draw some people away from the GPUGrid Project no matter what. If you can get 60,000 to 70,000 Per Day verses 10,000 to 13,000 Per Day here not counting the GTX 295's what you gonna do.

Maybe, maybe not ...

In my case it is far more likely that I will be careful with my positioning of GPU cards. And assigning projects according to where I can get the most for my investment and the most science ...

For those of us that have tried to get some common sense applied to the credit system we will still have to wait until the projects will side with us to get some sort of comprehensive review of the rules and mechanisms.

In my case, yes, one ATI card looks like when running full time on MW is able to earn me as much as my suite of Nvidia cards applied to GPU Grid. What I suspect will happen is that MW will be pressured to lower the award again even though they are right now awarding according to Dr. Anderson's formula...

I mean, are you here ONLY because of the awards? Or because you also want to contribute to the project?

Maybe, maybe not ...

Come on Paul, you know darn well People are going to be flocking even more to the Milkyway Project now that the stakes have been raised even more ...

In my case it is far more likely that I will be careful with my positioning of GPU cards. And assigning projects according to where I can get the most for my investment and the most science ...

Exactly, you hit the nail on the head Paul & right now it looks like I can or anybody else can get the most for their investment/investments @ the Milkyway Project & really from what it looks like do the most Science too.

I mean, are you here ONLY because of the awards? Or because you also want to contribute to the project?

Both really, I've always run any Project for the Credits & with the hope I'll maybe help out the Science of the Project too. But at most Projects including this one I don't have the slightest clue what the Project is up to. All I know is some Projects are into Astronomy, some Mathematics, some do Medical Research and others are into whatever their into.

I Attach to every Project that comes out & if I like the Credits, the Attitude of the Project's Dev's/Moderator's, the Participants in General then I'll stay with a Project longer than others, if I don't then I run up to a set Number of Credits & get outta Dodge as fast as I can so to say once I reach that set number of Credits never to run the project again in most cases.

That said why I run any Project is being heavily weighted to the Credits side more & more (Remember I said People called me a Credit Whore awhile back) as the expense of running them grows by leaps & bounds.

So in the end for me as I already stated when I can get 60,000 to 70,000 Credits @ 1 Project for a less than a $200 outlay verses only 13,000 to 14,000 Credits for the same amount of outlay it's a no brainier for me on which Project to lean towards & lay more resources their Doorstep ... :)

I mean, are you here ONLY because of the awards? Or because you also want to contribute to the project?

Saying that works for some, but by far not for everyone.. and most importantly, doesn't solve the problem. Actually, when the first F@H clients for the ATIs appeared I thought "How the hell would you do this in BOINC? It must screw up the credits."

With GPU-Grid we're just *lucky* that the result of the flop counting is not an order of magnitude higher than what CPUs achive. That's why this fundamental problem has been lurking in the darkness a little longer.

Is a GPU-Flop worth less than a CPU-Flop, because it's less universal? That's what F@H decided, in order to keep things in perspective. With MW we're facing the problem that the GPU-Flops are obviously as good as the CPU-Flops, because both are running the same WUs.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Is a GPU-Flop worth less than a CPU-Flop, because it's less universal? That's what F@H decided, in order to keep things in perspective. With MW we're facing the problem that the GPU-Flops are obviously as good as the CPU-Flops, because both are running the same WUs.

This is supposed to be true at SaH too ... at least that is what they claim ... but, my recollection when I ran some tasks from there on my GPU is that the awards are not the same ...

@PoorBoy,

Well, you see, I don't think that what you said will be true for me ... it is hard to predict about the future, but, at least near term I doubt that I will change much of anything at all even when Milky Way comes out with a Nvidia version. On the 9800GT I am not sure that I can even run the tasks at all ... and the only reason I might add them to the other systems is as a safety measure in case GPU Grid goes down ...

Again, the lack of interest by the developers in the upcoming events in the GPU world means that we are in for a long season... Projects with OpenCL applications will mean that the difficulty of assigning projects to GPUs will be that much more complex. A point I was trying to get across during the discussion of the work fetch policy changes. Sadly, we will have to wait until that problem bursts on the scene before they will start to think about that ... sigh ...

I agree with you about most of what else you said ... though, for me, it is more about the project's attitude, science, etc. than the credits ... but, they are important ...

This is supposed to be true at SaH too ... at least that is what they claim ... but, my recollection when I ran some tasks from there on my GPU is that the awards are not the same ...

How is that supposed to work? CPU and GPU are also running the same WUs over there, so naturally the credit reward has to be the same? And we're only not seeing super high credits per time for GPUs at seti because their algorithm doesn't use the full GPU potential (yet).

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

This is supposed to be true at SaH too ... at least that is what they claim ... but, my recollection when I ran some tasks from there on my GPU is that the awards are not the same ...

How is that supposed to work? CPU and GPU are also running the same WUs over there, so naturally the credit reward has to be the same? And we're only not seeing super high credits per time for GPUs at seti because their algorithm doesn't use the full GPU potential (yet).

MrS

I think the Credits are the same but with the GPU's you Supposedly (Not really convinced about that) run the WU's faster so you get more for your Buck. But the Credits are so bad even using the GPU's it doesn't really matter.

My 8800GT OC was anly getting about 20 Credits Per Hour @ Seti Project running the GPU WU's where it would get about 200 Per hour running the GPUGrid Projects WU's ...

I don't think the ratio is that bad, currently. I have a 8600GT running over there and it's got up to almost 800 RAC and looking at the daily update numbers of the last 7 days it makes 1080 credits / day. Compare that to 6000 for a 9800GTX+ at GPU-Grid with 4 times the shaders and ~60% higher shader clock.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I don't think the ratio is that bad, currently. I have a 8600GT running over there and it's got up to almost 800 RAC and looking at the daily update numbers of the last 7 days it makes 1080 credits / day. Compare that to 6000 for a 9800GTX+ at GPU-Grid with 4 times the shaders and ~60% higher shader clock.

MrS

8800 gt(512) nets aroud 1k w/ seti
same system gets 5-7k with gpugrid

Hi,
the way we compute credits is public and transparent to other projects for correctness. As always repeated is based on flops and the way BOINC assign credits.
See
http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=219
for more information.

gdf

PS: 5 times less for seti seems impossible, as they would credit similar to CPUs...

PS: 5 times less for seti seems impossible, as they would credit similar to CPUs...

and yet that is what i am seeing.
it could be they are undervaluing GPU time, or not using all the shaders, or their code still needs alot of tweaking, or a variety of other reasons. im not faulting anyone's point distribution methods just pointing out what i see.

i just set seti as equal priority to gpugrid i'll put up exact numbers as they come in

My 8600GT is up to 880 RAC and even had a one day break in between. So either seti has trouble utilizing more than 32 shaders.. or I'd tend to blame your observation.
At seti it may take a long time to see how many credits you really earn, due to the long deadline and many slow CPUs.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I've noticed that SETI has a tendency not to give me any cuda tasks if I'm running a long Astropulse calculation. Probably a scheduling issue, I'll be glad when this whole cude/OpenCL/DX11/whatever thing is finally mainstream and BOINC has figured out how to use it all without major headaches.

My 8600GT is up to 880 RAC and even had a one day break in between. So either seti has trouble utilizing more than 32 shaders.. or I'd tend to blame your observation.
At seti it may take a long time to see how many credits you really earn, due to the long deadline and many slow CPUs.

MrS

1 thing to note. almost every single one of the seti WU's you completed gave you less granted credit than claimed (with the exception of some very small WUs) by approximately 20%. GPUGRID has granted = claimed for every WU ive completed. seti grants credit on the lowest claimed credit which looking over your WU's is always the CPU based member of the quorum.

just some quick math
last 2 WUs running seti took 20min each = 57.8 claimed credit per WU. = 173.4 per hour = 4161.6 per day. now remove the 20% claim vs granted and we're at 3329. or roughtly half of what gpugrid was giving out. a far stretch from the 5x1 ratio but still pretty significant.

a pretty good overview is this

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_hosts.php
http://www.gpugrid.net/top_hosts.php

look at the difference between the top hosts.

again im not saying either point distribution method is wrong. or that the seti app couldnt stand some tweaking. what i am saying is theres a large discrepancy between how various projects grant credit for the same gpu/cpu time.

PS: 5 times less for seti seems impossible, as they would credit similar to CPUs...

and yet that is what i am seeing.
it could be they are undervaluing GPU time, or not using all the shaders, or their code still needs alot of tweaking, or a variety of other reasons. im not faulting anyone's point distribution methods just pointing out what i see.

i just set seti as equal priority to gpugrid i'll put up exact numbers as they come in

I'm leaning towards their code is not efficient and not all shaders are utilized based on amp readings I've ran with GPUz. It draws less AMPS than GPU grid!

The highest amp readings I've seen was with distributed.net CUDA clients, due to that project utilizing integers more than floating points, and Nvidia is known to be stronger in integers than floats!

Wow. Just stopped by here after a few days - lots of people (me included) seem to be spending some resources over at MW judging by the way the top ten lists have changed.....

Wow. Just stopped by here after a few days - lots of people (me included) seem to be spending some resources over at MW judging by the way the top ten lists have changed.....

Don't think I am anywhere near the top ten list. BUt I did add one ATI card to my systems so I am contributing that. Also the new OS-X optimized application is shaving some time off my workload so that helps a little bit too ...

Were it so that I had 10 computers like my past .., sigh ...

Were it so that I had 10 computers like my past .., sigh ...

Don't worry, your current computers are more computer than your old machines will ever be.. ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Were it so that I had 10 computers like my past .., sigh ...

Don't worry, your current computers are more computer than your old machines will ever be.. ;)

Yes, they are ...

But, with 10 boxes I could have 10 GPUs ... Even a slow box with the capabilities to run a GPU will now be able to return significant work. Sadly, I only have one old box that has PCI-e in it, the other two I have are AGP ...

On that note, now The Lattice Project is saying that they will be coming out with GPU tasks "soon" ... they plan to have applications for ATI, CUDA, and OpenCL ... or at least that is the way I read the note. Most interestingly is that the implementations will not be universal. By that they indicate that they may come out with an Nvidia CUDA application for one tasks type and an ATI application for another. The idea according to them is to limit the number of versions.

Though as I understand OpenCL, if they use that as their target it will be a "simple" re-compile ...

Though I suspect that targeting the native / proprietary API, at least for the near term is going to produce faster applications ...

Though as I understand OpenCL, if they use that as their target it will be a "simple" re-compile ...

Though I suspect that targeting the native / proprietary API, at least for the near term is going to produce faster applications ...

Agreed. The current implementations are probably better optimized. And... seems like my next board should have 2 PCIe slots, although that will make silent air cooling a real challenge. And I'd need a new PSU.. not because the current one couldn't handle the load, but because its fan would get too loud!

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

[ Sadly, I only have one old box that has PCI-e in it, the other two I have are AGP ...

Paul,

As I recall, some of the compute capable cards from ATI were produced in AGP (e.g., Radeon HD 2600 XT, Radeon HD 3650, Radeon HD 3850, Radeon HD 3870), though I don't know if these will work with Milkyway@home...but for other future projects???