Forum > GPU crunching
Unified installer add flops
efmer (fred):
Just a suggestion ,it would be nice to add a flops statement to the app_info.xml.
Because BOINC still doesn't have a separate CPU / GPU scheduler, the flops statement is essential is you have a faster GPU installed.
Without the flops, I see GPU tasks planned for almost 3 hours, as they take only 15 minutes or less, this causes the scheduler to request no GPU tasks.
Jason G:
--- Quote from: Fred M on 06 Dec 2009, 05:13:59 am ---Just a suggestion ,it would be nice to add a flops statement to the app_info.xml.
Because BOINC still doesn't have a separate CPU / GPU scheduler, the flops statement is essential is you have a faster GPU installed.
Without the flops, I see GPU tasks planned for almost 3 hours, as they take only 15 minutes or less, this causes the scheduler to request no GPU tasks.
--- End quote ---
Have been thinking about *something* along those lines, so it must be a good idea :P. It's on a pretty long list of stuff that needs looking at ... Have not managed to work out how to best determine a default entry ... I'm hoping to avoid having to parse boinc state files (as they can be problematic for a few reasons) and installer parsing capabilities aren't easy to program.
It might be best to leave that to a separate small GUI app (perhaps optionally installed in installer & run after setup. ) which could be run even sometime after installation (for 'recalibration' to new hardware etc, could evolve into kindof a control panel applet or similar). If that looks like the way to go (when I get to it), then I'll lliase with Richard Haselgrove on the latest best defaults. Since I've been preoccupied with my own 'fiddling', rather than concerned with how flops is dealt with now that new Boinc versions seem to have multipled the performance of my card by five for no apparent technical/practical purpose other than marketing ::).
Jason
efmer (fred):
--- Quote from: Jason G on 06 Dec 2009, 05:36:10 am ---
--- Quote from: Fred M on 06 Dec 2009, 05:13:59 am ---Just a suggestion ,it would be nice to add a flops statement to the app_info.xml.
Because BOINC still doesn't have a separate CPU / GPU scheduler, the flops statement is essential is you have a faster GPU installed.
Without the flops, I see GPU tasks planned for almost 3 hours, as they take only 15 minutes or less, this causes the scheduler to request no GPU tasks.
--- End quote ---
Have been thinking about *something* along those lines, so it must be a good idea :P. It's on a pretty long list of stuff that needs looking at ... Have not managed to work out how to best determine a default entry ... I'm hoping to avoid having to parse boinc state files (as they can be problematic for a few reasons) and installer parsing capabilities aren't easy to program.
It might be best to leave that to a separate small GUI app (perhaps optionally installed in installer & run after setup. ) which could be run even sometime after installation (for 'recalibration' to new hardware etc, could evolve into kindof a control panel applet or similar). If that looks like the way to go (when I get to it), then I'll lliase with Richard Haselgrove on the latest best defaults. Since I've been preoccupied with my own 'fiddling', rather than concerned with how flops is dealt with now that new Boinc versions seem to have multipled the performance of my card by five for no apparent technical/practical purpose other than marketing ::).
Jason
--- End quote ---
The easiest way is by a GPU card list, because as you already stated, the reported values are not very accurate, but have to be as high as possible, marketing wise.
If you are interested I could help you with some things, I have some experience. Detecting the nVidia and AMD cards is fairly easy to do.
Jason G:
--- Quote from: Fred M on 06 Dec 2009, 05:45:22 am ---The easiest way is by a GPU card list, because as you already stated, the reported values are not very accurate, but have to be as high as possible, marketing wise.
If you are interested I could help you with some things, I have some experience. Detecting the nVidia and AMD cards is fairly easy to do.
--- End quote ---
Cheers Fred. Good ideas. A few things that I need to look at before getting to that. In the meantime, for reference, the installer system I use is the NSIS one, and can run external (customi by us) executables for detection etc.
Probably if you're going to be helping out with installer stuff (which has proven a bit more important/successful than I thought it would) then you should have some developer access. I'll forward a link to this post/thread to Gecko_R7, to see if it's possible/feasible to arrange that. [Edit: haven't seen much of our liizard friend lately, hopefully he's still about & doing well]
Jason
Richard Haselgrove:
--- Quote from: Jason G on 06 Dec 2009, 05:36:10 am ---Have been thinking about *something* along those lines, so it must be a good idea :P. It's on a pretty long list of stuff that needs looking at ... Have not managed to work out how to best determine a default entry ... I'm hoping to avoid having to parse boinc state files (as they can be problematic for a few reasons) and installer parsing capabilities aren't easy to program.
--- End quote ---
Agreed, parsing state files is a pain. The 'correct' way to do it within BOINC would be a GUI_RPC: but - I've just done one with <get_host_info> (against v6.10.21), and it only mentions the CPU. No reference to the CUDA card at all!!
Fred - please check and confirm: they've forgotten to add any GPU information to the standard GUI_RPC calls (<get_state> says nothing either). I'll check with DA, too.
Pending that, there is no way of getting GPU information even by file parsing - it would have to be direct detection. I would suggest it would be better to query the card(s) directly for shaders/speeds/compute capability, and impute a figure from that - like the old BOINC 'est flops' figure, peak is useless - rather than working from a look-up list which would be difficult to maintain and go rapidly out of date.
--- Quote from: Jason G on 06 Dec 2009, 05:36:10 am ---It might be best to leave that to a separate small GUI app (perhaps optionally installed in installer & run after setup. ) which could be run even sometime after installation (for 'recalibration' to new hardware etc, could evolve into kindof a control panel applet or similar). If that looks like the way to go (when I get to it), then I'll lliase with Richard Haselgrove on the latest best defaults. Since I've been preoccupied with my own 'fiddling', rather than concerned with how flops is dealt with now that new Boinc versions seem to have multipled the performance of my card by five for no apparent technical/practical purpose other than marketing ::).
Jason
--- End quote ---
Happy to work with you on it when the time comes. Remember also that effective flops are strongly dependent on the version of the CUDA .DLLs in use, and judging by recent reports, driver version as well (195.xx on Win7 is horribly slow, I read - but that may just be FUD).
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