WCG Beta Testing GPU Work

[doneske]

WCG is now beta testing OPN work on GPUs. ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel are available. Only requirement so far is OpenCL 1.2

See this link.

 

[Vester]

Will be on it soon.

Edit: I caught a few work units. The were very short and have not yet been validated. WCG shows computation time in hours, so they need to record seconds instead!

 

[doneske]

During the initial beta test they were issuing batches of the same size as CPU batches. Uplinger added some larger batches and I assume those will be the ones distributed when they go production. I don't believe the batch sizes have been settled yet. I haven't been a big GPU user over the years but was able to acquire a Radeon Pro W5500 so I guess I'll install it and see what happens. I haven't tried installing GPU drivers on Centos yet so this will be a first for me. I decommissioned 4 servers and have been in discussion with Luckasz at iThena about shipping them to him. Once we get past this deep freeze that should pick up again.

 

[Nick Name]

I think these are the correct settings to only get GPU tasks, although I haven't gotten any yet.

Make sure Beta tasks are enabled for the desired profile(s). I'm just using School.

Set your GPU preferences under My Projects -> Device Profiles. Allow CPU tasks as well, or not in my case, and enable the appropriate GPU type for your hardware.

 

[Vester]

I didn't have much time to observe performance when GPU work was available. I am running CPU tasks while waiting for GPU Beta work, but I have an app_config.xml file and CPU work units are limited when GPU work is running. Here is the text I am using for a single GPU on a quad core CPU.

<app_config>
<app>
<name>beta29</name>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>0.25</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>1.0</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>
</app_config>

 

[Nick Name]

For those new to the app_config, it only controls BOINC scheduling. The CPU and GPU will use whatever resources they need regardless of what's set here. This will keep a thread free for GPU processing though.