Posted on 09/16/2007 6:43:18 AM PDT by texas booster
To all nVidia owners, from an nVidia developer forum, by Mark Harris, nVidia:
“Actually, we never thought it was a bug in brook — the question was briefly raised, but it didn’t take long to verify that this was not the case. We have been cooperating with Mike Houston (Stanford) in tracking down the bug; the application is complex and required someone familiar with the application code to narrow the problem down to something that was easier to isolate. Mike has done that and I have filed a bug. Unfortunately, our driver engineers are busy with many other application issues to solve and features to implement. They will get to this issue in due course.”
“I too would like to see F@H on NVIDIA GPUs, but our engineering managers have to set priorities appropriately based on many factors competing for their team members’ time.
“We’re currently focused on CUDA for GPGPU applications, because the architecture and programming model (especially the on-chip shared memory and thread synchronization) have clear and proven benefits to performance compared to pure “streaming” approaches (aka GPGPU via OpenGL or Direct3D) for many parallel computations.
Mark”
Don’t feel bad about hanging out at the same place. I haven’t moved up or down in months. Lucky if I even go up one before New Years.
Keep trudging along and know that it’s for a great cause.
Texas,
Could you please post whenever an update comes along for any client. I didn’t know about the update for the PS/3 until you posted it here. Got to keep cranking away so the DUmmies are always in the basement.
I've going up since getting this new puter. With my old one sometimes it took close to two weeks to fold one wu.
Keep trudging along and know that its for a great cause.
That's a comfort to me.
*rolls eyes*
thinking faster than you type...
I believe that is something that will evenutally be corrected by folding.
In the meantime, if you can’t think fast enough there’s a website called Democratic Underground that suffers the same problem. (although they suffer a chronic version of it)
Btw anyone here using the new(er) ATI 2400, 2600 or 2900 series video cards to do folding yet and has Stanford come out with the new folding optimizations for these new hardware.
It is expected that the drivers will be fixed by the end of the year. Until then we can rest knowing the the release of Catalyst 7.8 increased the speed of the ATI cards by 50% running under Vista. We expect very nice folding times from the cards when they are released.
Optimization is a key word at Stanford, as we have seen with the PS3. The GPU kernal will be upgraded to add the cards when testing is complete to ensure quality folding.
Congrats on your first work units being completed for F@H!
You can check your progress here:
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&a=2&t=36120
Let the CPU keep crunching away. Unless you are running a GPU core then the deadline for returning work units is much more than a week.
Then when you get back online you will get a sudden pop in points.
If you have more than one computer you can install the best F@H for each system, and as long as you use the same name for each and Team 36120 then you get all the credit.
That’s how some FReepers can have 80 CPUs folding at once. One of the few side benefits from being a system administrator.
Sys Admins can do that! I’m jealous, all I have are my own systems. Can I borrow a few of yours :)
tb, Thanks for the mention. I am running two dual amd’s and one single Intel 2.25.
The amd’s are running vista with vmware server and the linux folding client.
The intel is xp pro with the windows client (not service).
amd rocks although now they are saying the multi-core intels are beating them. whatever.
I would like a playstation but cannot justify it in my own mind except for folding. How much electricity does it use I wonder?
fold on
Sure you can have a few systems if I can have a new system.
Wanna trade a few Sempron 1300’s for an Intel dual core?
Those there dual cores will blow out normal systems just by running the SMP core. I think that they also out-perform the PS3 for now.
I was looking at a microwulf type cluster. Taking some of my older machines (single core) and making a Quad and running the SMP client on them. Any idea if this would work?
We’re talking about 2GHz Athlons for the project. I doubt that two of them together would get the job done, and I’m sure that there is some overhead from having the chips on different systems, but I suspect that 4 together might do a pretty decent job.
Each of these systems singularly would post about 100ppd (give or take). So I’m looking at 400 at best.
A single dual-core with each core running about 2GHz with the smp client will post about 450ppd.
The way I figure it I should get near 600ppd even with the inefficiency. Not bad for keeping a few older systems around.
I could also save a little bit of power by having them in a microwulf as I would only need a HDD and other peripherals on one system.
Give me any feedback you might have on this as I trust your judgement (that’s probably foolish).
I won’t be able to start work on this project for a bit more than a week as I’m in Korea with our troops, but it seems like a fun project.
The Folding forums have a couple of beowulf threads. The general consensus is that you need a GB lan and lots of memory to keep the work unit writes from overwhelming the bandwidth of your network.
SMP works well with multiple cores on a chip since the bandwidth is so great. Thrashing is a very real problem as bottlenecks develop across the network.
You will not get anywhere near full performance, but the points bonus alone may make it worthwhile.
It can’t hurt to experiment. Keep us posted.
F@H is now outputting 1249 teraFLOPS, or 1.25 petaFLOPs.
The PS3 is at 985 teraFLOPs, and may hit 1 petaFLOP by itself next week.
Amazing!
Also, klutz will hit 6 million points this week. lrenh will hit 3 million points next week, Malsua will hit 2 million points in a couple of weeks and dbender5555 will break 200,000 points this week.
BTW, DU hit 6 million points as a team last month. At this rate klutz will pass their entire team in a few months.
I just checked, and found that I should hit the top 25 on the team sometime in 2014 -- folding right along! Woo-Hoo !!
Also gives me a chance to drop my new Sig panel in here, see if we can garner some more members to help out:
“DU hit 6”...D who? :)
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