Posts by Providence Christian School

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Fetching no GPU work (Message 61884) Posted 22 Jun 2009 by Providence Christian School Post: ... There are now about 6 projects that are working on GPU tasks and ... Which are those six? I can only come up with three and a half: Seti, gpugrid, AQUA (they also do multicore), milkyway (this is the half. ATI works, but CUDA isn't up an running yet.) ... A couple of projects have looked at it and for one reason or another aren't going to GPU processing. One project says it can't produce enough work to keep the GPU's busy, most say the GPU's don't supply enough precision for what they currently do. They say they will 'look again in the future if things change' but don't get your hopes up! Going to GPU processing has turned Milky Way into a project that either has work or doesn't have work. The GPU's blast thru the work faster than the CPU's and the project can't make work fast enough, so they often run out!! Of course all that crunching then needs to be analyzed, so more work for the project at a faster rate! And since alot of the projects use a ton of volunteers, they are kinda between a rock and a hard place. science doesn't translate well to a massively parallel algorithm is a perfectly fine argument, but "too fast" isn't. Everyone in the BOINC community needs to be a good citizen. And one way to be a good citizen is to responsibly use the donated resources by supplying the most efficient apps for your project. This means GPU and SSEx when applicable. If you run out of work units either you could expand your project or free up the compute resources for another project. The donated BOINC compute resource is "free" to a project just like donations to the Red Cross are "free". They still need to be used responsibly because if the Red Cross doesn't need them right now there are plenty of other causes which do need those resources. Milkyway has been having WU issues for a couple of months, but this is a mark of progress. They first massively optimized their program and used SSEx optimizations to gain something around an order of magnitude of improvement, then because of their openness a user developed an ATI GPU program which gave something like 2 orders of magnitude improvement, now they are working on a CUDA version. Their ability to do science has dramatically improved and when they don't have a WU then I crunch on another project. This is much better than inefficiently slogging through 16 hr work units which we now know can be processed in minutes or seconds, that time is now free to work on someone else's project or do much more work for MW. This is not an indictment against any project, just a general request to the BOINC admin community to use the donated resource wisely.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Fetching no GPU work (Message 61814) Posted 17 Jun 2009 by Providence Christian School Post: ... There are now about 6 projects that are working on GPU tasks and ... Which are those six? I can only come up with three and a half: Seti, gpugrid, AQUA (they also do multicore), milkyway (this is the half. ATI works, but CUDA isn't up an running yet.)