Config file to run three different GPU utilization for three different cards
26 Sep 2012 12:16:10 UTC
Topic 196538
(moderation:
So, I spent $400 a couple of days ago on a 7970 GPU thinking that it would run circles around my 570 and 260 because of the increased double floating point performance. All three cards are in one computer. With only one E@h workunit running per card the 7970 doesn't do anything. If I increase it to two workunits per card the 7970 runs around 75% but still takes over an hour to do one workunit. The 570 takes 40 min and uses less of the CPUs. If I increase to three workunits per card the 7970 is running 80% plus but then I run out of CPU cores and the 260 and the 570 chokes. Right now I am only interested in doing einstein@home on the GPUs. I though about taking the 260 out and putting it in another computer that has another 260 but this still doesn't solve the problem. Once I change it on the Einstein@home preferences the 2 260s in the other computer will still choke. Is there a way to write a config file for one computer that will assign one job to the 260, two jobs to the 570 and 3 jobs to the 7970? And even if that is possible, is the 7970 the best card for this project. If the Einstein code will not be optimized to take full advantage of the 7970's superior floating point performance should I just return it and get another 570 or 580. They are about $100 cheaper anyway.
Config file to run three different GPU utilization for three dif
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You can set your computers on different venues (home, school, work) and then you can set different utilization factors (and other prefferences) for each venue. But the prefferences are per computer, not per GPU, so all the GPUs in the same host will use the same factor and that's a limitation impossed by BOINC.
AFAIK, Einstein uses only Single precision, and also, the apps for ATI/AMD that use OpenCL are not as faster as the apps for Nvidia on CUDA, but Im not sure how much different are the speeds on equivalent ATI/Nvidia GPUs...
Oh. I wasted so much time
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Oh. I wasted so much time worrying about getting good DP performance. I was perplexed when the 7970 wasn't knocking out WU any faster than the 570. I took the 7970 back and will get a 680 or 690 instead then.
Thanks.
So today I returned the 7970
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So today I returned the 7970 and bought a 560ti that was on clearance for half the price. Since the 560ti uses quite a bit less power than a 680 and does pretty good crunching anyway I thought the rational heat/power route is a good choice even though it's a 1000 watt power supply.
I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but I just put the 560ti and 570 in one computer and the 2 X 260 in another computer and created a new account just for that computer. Now I can control each computer's resources better and run one work unit at a time for the 260s which seems to be the most efficient setup for these cards. The 260s knock out one WU every 50 min on average so I think it's still worth burning the electricity these cards consume. I would think running a 610 or 520 class card would not be worth the electricity even if they can do one WU every two or three hours.
In a month or so I will buy another 560 ti for the third empty PCI express slot. I am not sure if it will be worth it though. I don't know how the saturation of PCI express bus, the extra system memory, and more CPU resources to feed three GPUs in this system will make it worthwhile.
I also read about a procedure to create multiple clients on one computer but could never get it to work.
RE: I don't know why I
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Pairing different GPUs in one host matching those that are "similar" in performance and features is allways the best option.
But while there is nothing wrong on running more than one account, your RAC and credits will never be added togheter, neither you will be able to merge the accounts. If not worried by the credits totals and statistics then you can ignore the rest of this post.
If you dont want your credits splitted, you can use the same account on all your computers and set them using different preferences exactly in the same way as if you had up to 4 accounts without any need to run multiple instances of the BOINC client (which is really tricky to achieve).
If you go to the project preferences page you will see at the end that it says "add separate preferences for "home", "work" and "school", if you click one of this you will be able to add a new set of preferences.
Once you added a new set with the right values then you only need to go to each host details page and at the end you will find a box in which you can select for that host which set of preferences that host will use.