Anyone got ati 5870 or later and want to push big points?

[grumpydaddy]

I have been away pushing my points total in an attempt to get into top 3 of country and top 100 overall.

I have an upgrade planned which frees up a rig to come back here and crunch gpu... and this made me wonder if any of you guys would like to crunch much bigger numbers???

HCC for GPU has been an eye opener... my best rig would produce 11K ppd on cpu and now it is 45K ppd on a pair of 5870's and 130K ppd on a 2600K with a 7950

GPU gets a whole lot more work done and can work well with older cpu's too

AMD GPU's are best suited but some nVidia are not too bad either for this

If you have the gpu's and are willing to give it a shot post in here and I can run through some stuff that may help.

[criss_glitch666]

I may as well get back into it. I have a single HD 6970. I just learned my oma has cancer (what my grandfather recently died of) so I am in to conquer that ****!!

[grumpydaddy]

Sorry to hear that criss. Though I wish it were otherwise, I think of what we do as something that is more likely to help our children and the later generations to come but there is always that chance of a discovery made soon.

It is possible to install a graphics card and run HCC on it. Of course some cards are better than others at this so for the moment I consider something like an HD 5850 or a GTX 260 as the minimum card from each brand that will produce results.

Just installing the card and in device manager>device profiles select the profile you want to use and ensure that work on gpu is turned on



Notice that in the pic above (outlined in red) I have cpu turned off. you may choose to run cpu.

This will now run your gpu crunching HCC but you will see that each work unit consists of a certain amount of cpu time followed by some gpu time followed by a chunk of cpu time some more gpu time and finally some cpu time to finish.

This effectively means that it is not as efficient as it could be because it is running either cpu or gpu. There is a solution:

Although more involved to set up one can run more than one work unit at a time on a graphics card using a file called app_config and a pre-release version of Boinc.

Get BOINC 7.0.42 from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/boinc_7...ows_x86_64.exe and install it (this is the windows 64bit version)

Now you need to open notepad and copy the following file into it:

<app_config>
 <app>
 <name>hcc1</name>
 <max_concurrent>3</max_concurrent>
 <gpu_versions>
 <gpu_usage>.33</gpu_usage>
 <cpu_usage>1.0</cpu_usage>
 </gpu_versions>
 </app>
 </app_config>

Now the important bit:It needs to be saved in <boinc>\data\projects\www. worldcommunitygrid. org folder save as " app_config.xml " (without quotes) using the all files option and not .txt


In the above file you can control the maximum number of HCC GPU wu's running at any time ON THE RIG using <max_concurrent></max_concurrent>

In the above file you can control the maximum number of HCC GPU wu's running at any time PER GPU using <gpu_usage></gpu_usage> This is a fractional value so .5 runs 2, .33 runs 3, .25 runs 4 etc.

In the above file you can control the amount of cpu allocated to each gpu work unit using <cpu_usage></cpu_usage> This too can be a fractional value if you choose but to begin is probably best left at 1.0 core/thread


When you start Boinc manager now you should see the following in the log.



It is somewhat imperfect but all you need to do now is offset the work running on GPU so that at any one time there is gpu work running.

Sorry if this seems a bit disjointed but I am recovering from what was almost Man-Flu.... Feel free to ask questions.

[Skyguy]

So I've enabled GPU workloads (from what I can tell) by updating a profile and making sure BOINC has it enabled in the settings, but GPU-Z shows 0% load on the GPU so far. Does it take awhile to kick in or am I missing something?

BTW, I have all types of projects listed.

[grumpydaddy]

In the log, Do you have your gpu's recognised in similar fashion as the screenshot above? If so then I may have missed a bit that I was not aware of when I posted the setup.

Try removing the app_config for a few minutes and then re-start boinc. It should download some needed files and then download some work.

Once you see that your gpu is running you can suspend the work and exit boinc replace the app_config file where it was, restart Boinc and all should run according to the config file.

[criss_glitch666]

I will join in when I get a replacement GPU.

[Skyguy]

The Messages tab says "Requesting new tasks for CPU and GPU". I haven't done that CPU optimization thing though. I didn't do the pre-release version of BOINC or the Notepad thing.

Does BOINC not run GPU yet and it needs a workaround that you've posted above?

[JamesLT3]

Since i dont use my GPU's for folding i can see if i can get them running for Crunching,but im not sure what the impact would be on folding and system strain. Any thoughts?

[grumpydaddy]

If it is requesting new tasks for both you should be good. it takes a while to get going sometimes.

Running gpu will detract from folding in that, depending on your graphics card, each work unit has about 20% of its runtime using cpu only.

[JamesLT3]

Hummm so if i do the GPU crunching i will have to disable one core per card from folding, ill play around with it tonight and see what happens! Thanks Grumpy!

[grumpydaddy]

If you go the app_config route you can try specifying a partial core maybe but I have no idea if that core when it is not being used by wcg is free to be used by anything else.

There is a period at the start of each work unit that is cpu only for maybe 20 seconds then in the middle of the job there is another period of cpu nearer a minute and again at the end another 40 seconds. while the work is running on gpu there is some cpu use but it is small... certainly not a whole core.

Have a play and see what happens.

[Skyguy]

Well still no GPU workloads

[grumpydaddy]

Which BOINC version do you have ??