Message boards : Number crunching : Problem with deadline
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Hi all :) | |
ID: 14920 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
My GPU is not the best one, I know that , but I want to share my resources. Short answer: It's not likely to happen. Long answer: This is a question that has been asked before. Unfortunately, GPUGRID relies on getting one set of results back in order to generate the next set of results. Because of this, getting the results back quickly is very important, especially as compared to other projects. That's the reason the deadlines are so short. Making the deadlines longer to allow for slower GPUs to contribute could slow the project down rather than speeding it up. The effect of your contribution, although well-meaning, could actually hurt the project overall rather than aid it. As for making the WUs shorter, that's something I don't recall seeing discussed. Perhaps someone from the project itself can comment on that. To put things in perspective, the GPU in your laptop is some 30 times slower than the current top of the line GPUs being used here. It just takes too long to process the WUs. VERY few mobile GPUs are fast enough for this project. See this thread for a comparison of various GPUs. Amongst all the mobile GPUs, currently only the 8800, 9800, GTS 150, GTS 160, and GTX2xx mobile processors are fast enough. Those GPUs have a minimum of 64 shaders while the 8400M GS has only 16 shaders. Some desktop cards have as many as 240, and once the new FERMI cards are released they'll have up to 512. ____________ Want to find one of the largest known primes? Try PrimeGrid. Or help cure disease at WCG. | |
ID: 14923 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Hi Michael :) | |
ID: 14929 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Try Einstein. I have the same card in my laptop. Although it is capable of completing tasks, it can no longer do them in time. It also caused a few screen glitches, and probably ran very hot, so I took it off the project. Einstein uses both CPU and GPU, but does not stress the GPU too much, so I would say that it is ok to run that project. | |
ID: 15152 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Have you tried this card with with the new application version? It shortens the time considerably. | |
ID: 15158 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Try Einstein. Definitely do NOT try Einstein. Their GPU application is not worth running; it is a waste of your GPU resources. It runs primarily on your CPU; your GPU does hardly any work. Depending on the relative speeds of your CPU and GPU, you'll either (at best) see a very small increase in speed running their GPU app and at worst actually see the GPU app run SLOWER than the CPU app! Not all problems can take advantage of the type of computer inside a GPU (a parallel vector processor), and Einstein may be one of those that can not. Einstein's GPU app ALSO uses a FULL CPU core in addition to the (mostly idle) GPU. Essentially, you're running a normal CPU app that also happens to tie up your GPU, thus preventing your GPU from doing something useful. I'd recommend SETI@Home. You can also try Milkyway and/or Collatz, although I'm not 100% sure what the GPU requirements are for those applications. | |
ID: 15170 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
The general consensus among the professionals and the administrators of this site is that you dont use a laptop GPU, as it often causes serious hardware problems. | |
ID: 15181 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
The general consensus among the professionals and the administrators of this site is that you dont use a laptop GPU, as it often causes serious hardware problems. Yes I agree 100%. Actually more than 100% since I actually would go further than that. I also consider it unwise to run CPU BOINC tasks on a laptop for the exact same reason. I don't run BOINC at all on my laptops. Most people running BOINC want to get the most out of it, so they'll set the laptop to max power and run the CPU at full speed 24/7. That's not much better for the machine than running the GPU 24/7. Consider this: Do you clean out your desktops to get the dust out of them? The dust really kills the cooling ability of the heatsinks. You can't even get to the heatsinks in a laptop to clean them out, unless you really want to disassemble it. Laptops are far more fragile in a lot of ways, including their ability to discharge heat. They are far more likely to fail than desktops, and heat is much more of a problem. Of note is recent problems Nvidia has had with laptops, with a bunch of recalls, BIOS changes to make the fan run continuously, and so forth. With that in mind, my advice would be that if you want to keep your laptop running, don't run BOINC at all on it. If you don't care if it fails (e.g., it's old an you don't mind replacing it or it's already obsolete so you might as well run it into the ground) then my recommendation to get the most out of the GPU would be SETI. But my real recommendation is to not run BOINC. | |
ID: 15187 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Well said. | |
ID: 15192 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
As for dust, I use a Vacuum cleaner to suck any dust from the vents of all my systems, laptops or desktops. You know, I never thought of using a vacuum on a laptop. That's not a bad idea. Thanks! | |
ID: 15195 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
My machine needs 10 hours to finish a task from GPUgrid. I agree with Vladimir, such tasks are too big for 5 days' deadline (and such deadline is too short at all, too short for supporting every project). My machine is "at work", it is NOT always running 24/7 and may be turned off for weekend (and weekends sometimes are longer than 2 days). Unfortunately, my attempt to support this project seems to be a headache... | |
ID: 15306 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Each project has requirements and it is a delicate balance between the science of the project, the servers, the scientists, and the crunchers. The GPUGrid team is doing excellent work with the time, money, and resources available to them but ultimately they have to make decisions that are best for the project which are not necessarily what we as crunchers want. It is a privilege to participate, it is not a right and we all have to the freedom to choose. If your card can not crunch for two hours a day, you are correct, this may not be the best project for you to participate in. No hard feelings? it is just the technical requirements of the project. | |
ID: 15309 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Each project has requirements and it is a delicate balance between the science of the project, the servers, the scientists, and the crunchers. YES!!! A DELICATE... :-) For example, few days ago the most successful GPU-project MilkyWay had absolutely unacceptable deadline, but overnight... They found a reserve or possibility to raise it almost 3 times. :-) ____________ | |
ID: 15311 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
What GPUGrid does (over simplified) is to look at atomic interactions in very very very samll fractions of seconds (femto to nano). Because the equation is very difficult to process it simply takes a lot of power and a lot of time. The GPUGrid project builds WU based on the results of previously executed WUs. If they increase the deadline too much it would be an very long time before they had any usable results at all. Once you start to stretch out the time between usable results you have to add more task streams which itself takes a lot more effort in every aspect including the number of WUs necessary to keep all streams populated. The increase of WU streams in turn will slow down the whole process. I am sure if it was as easy as adding another hard drive they would have done that already. | |
ID: 15314 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Thank You, Steve! I understand, what is "immediate science goals", so my 1st reply here was a small frustration of novice, nothing more. Your advice is very good too. I think, I will use GPUgrid (this project is really worth to participate) for filling the gaps between SETI@home tasks. | |
ID: 15315 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
It might help if you configure Boinc to run according to a timetable, and set the additional work buffer to Zero. That way Boinc will try to accommodate you by downloading and running tasks that will finish in time (according to your timetable). | |
ID: 15337 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
skgiven | |
ID: 15654 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Seriously though? my project said the same thing when I turned it in after 5 days. We aren't talking weeks, but days. How is that too long to wait? And what happens to the WUs we finish "too late" to get credit for? Our machines run for 5 days doing research for you and get zippo in return because 5 days is too long? | |
ID: 16146 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
I must agree. It's getting harder & harder to participate in GPUGRID.net is this a rich people only club? I had an 8800GT that I could use last week, now I get the message GPU doesn't have enough memory. I know that 256MB isn't much, but I have a weird mainboard. It has a Geforce 9400 IGP. If I set it at 512MB I can only use the IGP. If I set it to 256MB it'll register the 9400IGP & the 8800GT, but just recently, GPUGRID.net reports that I don't have enough memory on my GPU, last week it was enough. It was really depressing, because I spent several days finding & installing the required drivers, finding the BOINC version that could detect both GPU's, find the correct setting in BOIS & Nvidia Control Panel, & now it's not good enough for GPUGRID.net because everybody has to have a GF100 or G200 to participate. | |
ID: 16147 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
The methodology this projects' scientists invented and the software they wrote to execute is very computationally intense. As mentioned in prior posts in this thread, this project builds WUs from the results of a previous WU so quick turnaround is paramount. | |
ID: 16156 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
My next attempt to participate. | |
ID: 19046 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Yes, ultra-heavy tasks and computation errors after hours of processing on my GPU. | |
ID: 19048 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
You ran one task. | |
ID: 19052 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
You ran one task. Yes, of course - I ran one task and got more than 104K points for my one result. ;-) The GTS250 is not a great card for crunching here. I said exactly the same already in my previous reply. Few weeks ago my GPU was "great" enough - it was possible to process 2 tasks pro 1 day. But today this "welcome to project, GTS250" stage is gone. I agree with liveonc - "this is a rich people only club". Maybe, server status explains a lot? 1K tasks ready to send, 4K - in progress... Not very much... :-) | |
ID: 19057 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Few weeks ago my GPU was "great" enough - it was possible to process 2 tasks pro 1 day. But today this "welcome to project, GTS250" stage is gone. Things change... New projects are introduced, new applications built, new drivers used, new cards get supported, and new crunchers come along with their new cards to have a go. One of my GT240's presently takes about 18h to run a TONI_KKi4 task, 19h for an IBUCH task and 15h for a KASHIF_HIVPR. The GT240 is a more reliable card for crunching than a GTS250 and it is faster, Much Cheaper and uses less electric, so I dont go along with rich club crunchers. Further, a £50 GT240 can do more work here than an i7-980X in many CPU only projects. Yes the top end GTX200 range of card and the Fermi's are more expensive, but they also do more work. You could buy 4 GTX470's for the price of an i7-980X and get a RAC of 250K with that lot. If you want to crunch get a GPU you can afford, and dont spend a fortune on the CPU. So we recommend a GT240 as an entry level crunching card. We do not recommend buying Compute Capable 1.1 cards to crunch here, but if you have one and it runs reasonably well by all means use it. Getting it to work well will be the difficult part, especially saying as it is 2 generations old now. If you want to spend more then there are other cards to look at. The server status? On this project each running tasks is generated from a previous task. When it is returned it will be used to generate the next task, and so on. Having tens of thousands of tasks would slow the research down. So the present ratio is excellent. | |
ID: 19059 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Not only do computation times change, so does the data volume. | |
ID: 19060 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
I would agree that a bit more info might have been posted when the team announced these new tasks, but I know the team are presently very busy. Perhaps a list of running apps with upload & download requirements would be useful on the site. A list of some tasks is on the site but it is out of date and does not contain any info on task size. I'm sure regularly updating the web pages is low priority at the minute, so if people PM me their observed task upload & download sizes I can maintain a list in the Forum. | |
ID: 19061 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Since the average WU time has increased greatly (close to double) I think the time allowed for the bonuses should be increased too. With a 4 hour queue a GT 240 can barely make the bonus deadline and the older cards are out of luck. Who thinks a bonus deadline increase is in order? | |
ID: 19069 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
We can do smaller workunits, but then the deadline must be smaller too to keep the same pace, so it would not be of much help. | |
ID: 19070 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
We can do smaller workunits, but then the deadline must be smaller too to keep the same pace, so it would not be of much help. It's not like we're going to slow down so the pace should be the same. It's just that the longer WUs are pushing a lot of cards past the 1 day bonus limit. The average WU has gotten a LOT longer while the bonus time has not. How's that fair? The real effect is that as cards stop getting the bonuses people pull them off, so a net project slowdown. For instance, I used to run a number of 9600GSO and 8800GT (96 - 112 shader) cards here but pulled them a while ago. Now the GT 240 cards are starting to approach that point. | |
ID: 19071 | Rating: 0 | rate: / Reply Quote | |
Message boards : Number crunching : Problem with deadline