OSX GPU

Message boards : Number crunching : OSX GPU

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veryous

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Message 66340 - Posted: 27 May 2010, 16:54:36 UTC

Unless I'm reading this wrong, is there any ETA when Rosetta will be able to utilize GPU's, specifically on a MAC?
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Message 66341 - Posted: 27 May 2010, 17:06:30 UTC

Nope. No GPU usage in the near future.
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Profile Paul D. Buck

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Message 66342 - Posted: 27 May 2010, 18:23:46 UTC - in response to Message 66340.  

Unless I'm reading this wrong, is there any ETA when Rosetta will be able to utilize GPU's, specifically on a MAC?

Right now MAC GPU use is pretty much restricted to Collatz and I think EaH though the EaH application uses almost a full core as well as the GPU (GPU use is about 30%) ... which is why at this time I am solidly doing Collatz on my Mac ...

Rosetta is not likely to have a GPU application for any platform ...
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veryous

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Message 66344 - Posted: 27 May 2010, 23:04:39 UTC - in response to Message 66342.  

Unless I'm reading this wrong, is there any ETA when Rosetta will be able to utilize GPU's, specifically on a MAC?

Right now MAC GPU use is pretty much restricted to Collatz and I think EaH though the EaH application uses almost a full core as well as the GPU (GPU use is about 30%) ... which is why at this time I am solidly doing Collatz on my Mac ...

Rosetta is not likely to have a GPU application for any platform ...


Forgive my ignorance or curiosity here Paul, but why won't they ever have one? Is it just something with the way the project is coded?
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Message 66345 - Posted: 28 May 2010, 10:25:07 UTC
Last modified: 28 May 2010, 10:25:38 UTC

here's a thread on GPGPU ;): https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5218&nowrap=true#64790

I'm far from an expert on the subject but GPGPU will mature and there's a possibility of rosetta making use of it in the future, but at the moment I don't believe you can have an application efficiently use the GPU and CPU without adding a lot of hold-ups waiting for communication between the two. I would expect that having the CPU and GPU in the same package (i.e. bulldozer/fusion?) will make the process easier. I believe the expectation is that CPUs will lose some of their FPU power which will become the GPUs responsibility, but that might be invisible to the OS and done in hardware, so it wouldn't require any rewriting. I could be very wrong though!
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Message 66346 - Posted: 28 May 2010, 12:13:35 UTC

if he has a nvidia graphics card, he can use it to einstein @ home to calculate aid. ATI does not support einstein@home. I'm not entirely sure whether Einstein @ home Mac operating system to support the calculation. (Sorry poor english. i use google translator)
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Profile Paul D. Buck

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Message 66349 - Posted: 28 May 2010, 13:44:40 UTC - in response to Message 66344.  
Last modified: 28 May 2010, 13:46:35 UTC

Unless I'm reading this wrong, is there any ETA when Rosetta will be able to utilize GPU's, specifically on a MAC?

Right now MAC GPU use is pretty much restricted to Collatz and I think EaH though the EaH application uses almost a full core as well as the GPU (GPU use is about 30%) ... which is why at this time I am solidly doing Collatz on my Mac ...

Rosetta is not likely to have a GPU application for any platform ...


Forgive my ignorance or curiosity here Paul, but why won't they ever have one? Is it just something with the way the project is coded?

Nothing to forgive...

A GPU is like an old Cray computer, it is a Vector processor ... if your code uses vectors (arrays of numbers) and you do mostly vector math then the GPU will buy you speed just as the old vector processors used to ... if you don't, you can't ... :)

Wikipedia has a good article on vector processors ... and in their day they were the cat's pajamas for speeding up scientific research for those problems where the program is compatible ... but many problems are not that convenient ... so, vector processors are not the the solution to all problems ... and neither will GPUs solve all problems ... but for those that it can work for you, you can see 60-100 times increases in speeds ... the last time I ran a MW task on my CPUs it took about 4 hours ... my fastest GPUs do those same tasks in about 90 seconds today ...

The thing to focus on as the biggest positive is that the more projects that do move to use the GPU fully and release the CPU side means that those of us that do have GPUs can release the CPU side to work on those projects that are still locked to the CPU and at the same time provide terrific support to the GPU projects. In *MY* case I don't do Collatz, DNETC, GPU Grid, or MW on my CPUs at all ... for me they are pure GPU side projects... that means I have that much more time on my CPUs for the other 30 some project out there ... (~20-30K CS per day from my 500K-1M per day totals, see here).

There are other threads where I and others talk about this in more depth, you could page back in my posting history to find them, search did not see to find them (did not try advanced search, look for GPU, CUDA, or vector as another way to locate the discussions, I think one of the threads I commented in Dr. Baker also commented as well)...
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Message boards : Number crunching : OSX GPU



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