Lunatics are pleased to announce the availability of the v0.41 installer.
Please take care you use the right installer (32/64 bit) for your system.
Should you have any questions or problems - ask! Post in this thread or open a new one.
New in this installer:
Update of all MB applications to support MB v7
Update of all AP apps to latest revisions.
How to use the installer
For the CPU applications, you need to know what your CPU supports. Either check the Boinc startup messages or check with CPU-Z downloadable from
http://www.cpuid.comTick or untick CPU AP and MB applications as desired.
Tick ATI (OpenCL) AP or MB if/as desired.
Tick NVidia (OpenCL) AP or CUDA MB if/as desired.
More details further down.
NB We use default values throughout the app_info.xml. If you have previously installed optimised applications and manually edited app_info.xml (e.g. <count> for multithreading GPUs, <flops>, <cmdline> for ATI) you WILL lose those edits on running the installer and have to redo them. You may wish to make a note of them. You will also lose all other manual edits to app_info.xml such as beta applications.
Known issues - general
The installer is supposed to shut down the BOINC client whilst leaving the Manager running - noticable from the red 'disconnected' dot in the tray. After finishing the BOINC client should restart and the red dot vanish when the Manager reconnects. This may take a few minutes. On some systems however this fails to work. Please ensure BOINC has restarted.
Advanced users only: If you know you are going to edit app_info.xml, it may be easier to shutdown and restart BOINC manually, so you can get the changes into app_info.xml before the restart.
CPU MB apps - AKv8c
If you have any doubt at all about what instruction sets your CPU supports, download CPU-Z from
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html. We have now incorporated a 3rd party CPU feature detection tool into the installer. Unsupported applications will be greyed out.
CPU AP app - r1797
Updated from r555/r557
NVidia GPU (CUDA) app - x41zc
For details please see the separate ReadMe_x41zc.txt.
Rule of thumb selection guide:
Cuda 2.3: PreFermi - NOT to be used on Fermi/Kepler
Cuda 3.2: mixed systems
Cuda 4.2: Fermi
Cuda 5.0: Kepler
If you have run stock and have established APR you can also pick the fastest app from there.
For compatible cards see
http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpusShould run on all NVidia CUDA cards with at least 512MiB video RAM.
Actual free memory required is in the region of 200-235MiB, depending on driver, OS flavour and CUDA variant. The code will scale up if more memory is available.
Running on a 256MiB card is just possible, but you will have to free up as much VRAM as possible, e.g. by disabling Aero.
Used video RAM can be checked with GPU-Z downloadable from
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2244/techpowerup-gpu-z-v0-7-1/Watch closely on GPU-Z and in BOINC manager if the application finds enough memory.
Symptoms of insufficient memory are
- in BOINC manager: tasks start up and run a few seconds then go to 'waiting to run' and the next task tries to start
- on GPU-Z: the sensor for memory shows used VRAM ramping up and almost immediately dropping again.
Depending on BOINC version your tasks will either error out with 'too many exits' or get stuck in an infinite loop.
If you don't have enough memory, set BOINC to NNT, abort tasks and uninstall the CUDA application by rerunning the installer with CUDA MB UNticked.
If in doubt ask for help on NC:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_forum.php?id=10To multithread on Fermi/Kepler cards, find all instances of <count>1</count> in app_info.xml and decrease to 0.5 or 0.3 to run two or three tasks in parallel.
Again, if you are uncertain of how to do this correctly, ask on the above mentioned forum. 'Your mileage may vary' - it depends on your specific system which count will give the highest throughput.
For full release notes and history please see the readme provided in the docs folder [after install].
NVidia (OpenCL) AP app - r1843
Please see the separate ReadMe_AstroPulse_OpenCL_NV.txt for details.
Reserving one CPU core per GPU card will improve performance.
ATI (OpenCL) MB app - r1843
Please see separate ReadMe_MultiBeam_OpenCL_ATI.txt for details, especially on driver requirements.
Reserving one CPU core per GPU card will improve performance.
We offer the MB application in two different variants, depending on card:
plain - for most HD4xxx owners and those with HD5xxx, HD6xxx cards and HD7xxx cards who suffer from driver incompatibilities.
HD5 - for most if not all owners of HD5xxx GPUs and HD6xxx GPUs. For most HD7xxx cards ('Tahiti' core cards may prefer the plain app).
ATI (OpenCL) AP app - r1843
ATI (Brook) AP app - r1854
Please see separate ReadMe_AstroPulse_OpenCL_ATI.txt or ReadMe_AstroPulse_Brook.txt for details, especially on driver requirements.
Reserving one CPU core per GPU card will improve performance.
For cards without OpenCL support (from HD2xxxx on) use the 'hybrid' r1854 Astropulse application. NB this is a combined CPU/GPU application and will only use the GPU for some of the calculations, while doing the rest on a CPU core.
Minimum driver version Catalyst 9.x.
The Hybrid AP application uses about 80% of a CPU core and does only about 20% of the calculations on the GPU. Parameters have been choosen to reflect this usage. However present BOINC can not reserve '0.8' of a CPU core and therefore reserves none. This means your CPUs will be overcommitted and runtimes and DCF (if applicable) will suffer. You do increase the overall output though.
This time the thanks go to Joe (Josef W. Segur) for the optimised CPU apps, to Raistmer (with additional input from Urs Echternacht) for OpenCL apps and to Jason (jason_gee) for CUDA apps.
Thanks guys. There would be no need for an optimised app installer if there weren't optimised apps in the first place!
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our active alpha testers (in no particular order and apologies to anybody we've forgotten):
Claggy, arkayn and Mike.
Additional thanks go to BilBg for thoroughly beta-testing the installer and chasing several bugs out of it.
The Lunatics Installer team AD MMXIII
