SETI MB CUDA for Linux

[Raistmer]

vlar has 2 somewhat interrelated problems - very long kernel time (this leads to sluggishness, GPU locks and so on) and very low multiprocessor usage by some (same actually) kernel calls (this leads to very poor performance for VLAR tasks). GPU acts mostly as single-core CPU, not as huge-core one for this tasks. That is, the more MultiProcessors GPU has (the "cooler" it is) the bigger performance hit it experiences.

[riofl]

WOW! i finally upgraded enough libraries to get cuda 2.3 working right with  a 190.53 driver and the processing times have literally cut in half! typically they have been 30 min per wu for a long time. now they average 15min... sheesh!

now i just have to take my system down for a day or 2 to fully ujpgrade the o/s and kde to v4. im allowing so long a time because i expect some breakage from this since the system has not been fully updated in a year or a bit  more. so i may not be replying to anything until sometime saturday.

i was also using march=native in the compiler cflags and switched it to core2 when i realized native shuts off all the sse* capabilities. so far ive only done nvidia stuff and the 2.6.31 kernel upgrade. now i have to do the rest. response of the system is noticably better already.

[sunu]

Very nice riofl. The New Year brings new performance!   

[riofl]

whelp. i guess i am doomed for cuda 2.2 for this machine. 2.3 worked fine with my old install of the o/s and kde 3.5 after i upgraded and went to kde 4.3.3 it blew apart and boinc kept giving instant computation errors off my gtx285 and a slew more than normal off the tesla too. by the time i was able to stop it i must have wasted more than 100 workunits with 'computation error' and since the  tasks section has not updated since dec 31, i cannot look to see what the errors were

i expect kde is taking a ton more video resources even after i disabled more than half of kde so i returned to cuda 2.2 and its working just fine now... at least it is working on workunits instead of just trashing them.. time will tell...

guess as long as i continue using this machine i cannot get truly serious about crunching unless i go to some weaker desktop or i sit and waste days and days figuring out fvwm which from what i understand...

oh well...

[Claggy]

The tasks section might not have been updated since dec 31, but the results will have been,
you just have to find which result you want to look at. 

Claggy

[riofl]

ahh ok ill have to look for that. usually i just go to tasks  link for the computer, then click on errors and look at the latest date/time and thats usually what i just uploaded.

thanks

[sunu]

riofl, what distro do you use? After ubuntu destroyed itself last month for the n-enth time during the update to 9.10 I decided to ditch ubuntu and switch to sidux. I have kde 4.3.4 with no problems at all.

If you want, post here some of the computation errors you had. Because berkeley will have a power outage in a few hours post them here, don't give links.

[riofl]

they uploaded and i have no clue how to find them except in the errors listing once it is updated.
v 2.2 is working perfectly. weird.  i am using gentoo and havent updated my system for almost a year.. was running kde3.5.9 and it worked well. problem was that there have been so many changes and upgrades in everything over the past year that i started getting impossible dependency upgrades to install a simple program which wanted to upgrade half my o/s so i figured it was about time to bite the bullet and update   i am a firm believer in 'if it aint broke dont fix it' and i hardly ever update just because there is something new  available.

however in my effort to attempt to keep many of my configs especially login info and things, the upgrade path to kde 4.3.3 was not a smooth road. i had to uninstall much of kde 3.5 due to file collisions... i installed the monolithic version of 3.5 so it caused problems in not being able to remain in a slot. finally 4.3.3 installed and its quite nice in many ways but i get the impression that much of it is still way far from production ready.. my feeling is if 3.5 was a diamond, 4.3 is a pressured lump of coal. but there is no going back because gentoo has discontinued offering 3.5. i am slowly learning the ropes in 4.3 and find much of what i thought was not there was well hidden but still. i really dont need fancy desktops with flying windows and plasma zoom and other things.. but anyway enough rant. i have been configuring now for 20 straight hours and will be again tomorrow in an effort to get back to production by monday. have to tackle sound tomorrow. its a huge huge thing for me and presently it only plays less than a second of any file via the built in kde system... music and video are fine but i need the individual notifies i have configured so i know what i receive from whom before i even get to the computer.

 i suspect either something in the upgraded system and cuda don't like each other, or possibly this new desktop system uses considerably more video resources thereby choking out cuda.. i dont know. its a 1gb card and with 3.5 i was using around 400 to 500mb vidram for the desktops. time and research will tell.

also tomorrow i may try recompiling and reinstalling everything nvidia including the 2.3 toolkit/sdk just in case my system upgrades overwrote something they placed in the lib dirs since i did them before i upgraded.. i hate system upgrades   typically what i do is keep the same of everything until i build a new workstation for myself then that gets built clean from scratch with the latest of everything and then i copy/move/whatever things from old to new then wipe old and reinstall and use it as a secondary workstation.  not so in this case. i did something i never do. i updated the entire o/s and applications. to me thats asking for trouble

its an easy thing to keep updated if you do upgrades every few days. only one or 2 pkgs that way, but i committed the unpardonable sin of not updating for a year. thats where the problem is. gentoo is a cutting edge source distribution and everything gets compiled with your own specific compiler optimizations. you can install an os from prebuilt binaries but it is at best a compromise so after installing, i do a remake of world with an 'empty tree' which recompiles every byte of code to my optimizations.

[sunu]

That was also the problem with ubuntu. Every six months that a new version came out, I had very big problems with upgrade. With 9.10 and yet another unusable system I decided enough was enough. sidux is a rolling update distro, essentially it is updated every single day. It was one of the reasons that I chose it. With more frequent and smaller upgrade steps, I think any problems along the way are more manageable.

1 GB video ram should be more than enough. In ubuntu with compiz effects in full swing and a 3d game running I didn't have any memory problems.

Gentoo is a very configurable distro. I'm sure you can make it as lightweight as you want.

Would you consider changing your distro? You can run seti with a live cd from another linux distro and see if you are happy with it.

[riofl]

unfortunately i am steadfast on gentoo... if i update weekly as i did years ago when i first started with gentoo, there are never any problems and the upgrade path is very smooth. keeping it updated like that moves you slowly into the next 'distribution' so by the time a new level is announced you are already there painlessly.. i just ignored things and left it as it was because it worked.. my problems are my own stupidity in not keeping up with changes.. that wont happen again..

gentoo updates just about every day as well, but i found in the past with the options i use, an update world once a week generally is no more than 5 or 6 packages.

'if it aint broke dont fix it' works fine for hardware and even software that is static and never to be added to or updated.

it will take me a few weeks to iron all the quirks out to get it rock solid . i am just one to buck change for change's sake so weekly updates are against my nature, but.. hehe its the name of the game in this day.

i have played with most distros on another machine just to mess with them and i have never ever found a binary distro that i liked,  (to be fair to ubuntu though, they had probably the best install manager program off the cd i have ever seen),and to be able to recompile that distro the way i want it is pure hell trying to gather together all the sources etc... gentoo is the only source based distro i have found and it truly rocks.  i love it. it is also faster than any distro i have ever played with (because i compile to hardware specific optimizations).

[riofl]

if kde4 turns out to be a flop i will work with it  while i learn what i need to know to create a fvwm desktop with all the options i  want.. ill just install a virtual machine in this one and i can switch between them any time i want... i probably should have done that for the upgrade.. mirrored my system into a virtual machine and then upgraded that and once it was perfect, mirror it back to my main partition. oh well.. lesson learned for the next time... hehe you would think i would have thought of that automatically since my specialty is virtual servers and workstations   i manage 23 host machines each supporting a minimum of 20 virtual machines , some with as many as 80.

[riofl]

well, it has only gone through 4 workunits so far since the recompile of cuda 2.3 but it appears to be working again. evidently the system upgrades clobbered something it was linked to. time will tell. i still have to do the empty tree remake of world but i wont do that till next weekend so i have time to clean up all the config messes i have.

[riofl]

it has been running 2.3 toolkit and sdk fothe past 9 hours now and apparently no errors. i cannot tell for sure since so many are in 'uploading' status but the times look right. will know more when it uploads everything later tomorrow.

[riofl]

must have been a system upgrade clobbering a lib that cuda or the driver was linked to. for safety i recompiled and booted into the recompiled kernel, then recompiled the driver and cuda kits together, then rebooted again and it has been fine for  almost a full day.

[riofl]

is there a link for a setiathome 6.08 app not a vlar killer for cuda 2.2+? crunch3r has no search on his page and all i can find is a 64bit app dated january 2009.  anything newer? the vlar killer app i have says 2.2 in its name, but i want to drop the vlar killer now that i can move workunits around as needed.