Any tasks left for an old Mac with an AMD RX580?
22 Sep 2023 19:31:11 UTC
Topic 230106
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So I have an quite old MacPro 5.1 with and AMD RX 580 and 10.14 Mojave as system.
Now that all Gamma-ray pulsar binary search #1 on GPUs v1.17 tasks are finished I need something new to calculate. But the GW apps don't work on it - they end up in an endless loop, eventually error out. MeerKAT says straight it's not supporting my machine and that leaves me only with CPU tasks. And well they are not really efficient anymore on a 3rd gen Xeon...
Any options or do I have to retire the machine?
Holy... it has been 13 years... that computer did crunch for 13 years almost 24/7. Don't do this with a modern Mac tough, they are not made like that any more.
https://einsteinathome.org/host/3426951
probably just the CPU
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probably just the CPU tasks.
I saw you have GW tasks, but all were aborted. possibly a driver issue? can you update the drivers for it? or the OS? if everything is up to date, and you don't want to only run CPU tasks, then I'd say it's time to retire from Einstein. you might try other projects as well.
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Thank you for the answer. I
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Thank you for the answer. I manually aborted the tasks after I realised they don't finish. I have one task still running but it's at 17% after 90 minutes and I remember in the past they never finished. There is an issue with GW Tasks and Macs or at least the old ones.
Well I could update the system but then the hardware that I still need this old machine for wouldn't work anymore so that's not an option.
Well I still have two PCs attached to the project... so Einstein will go on, just that Machine will be taken offline. Or what other scientific project can you suggest that would support my system? After all the 580 is a really fine card for crunching.
Check PrimeGrid if you like
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Check PrimeGrid if you like number projects. or maybe WCG. I havent kept up on their apps but they do have an OpenPandemics COVID app for AMD GPU. I don't remember off-hand if it works on Mac though.
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So there is interesting news,
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So there is interesting news, like I had know it I left one GW task running. After work I put the computer to sleep but it somehow woke itself up and over night finished the GW task successful and verified. Although with a crazy long computing time.
So I will test with less tasks but think it's not sustainable to run GW tasks on this machine, the PCs are just so much faster and more efficient.
MacPro with Intel Xeon W3680 / AMD RX 580
run time: GPU/CPU - 24,718 / 9,296 seconds
PC with AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D / AMD Radeon PRO W7600
run time: GPU/CPU - 1,373 / 378 seconds
With the Gamma-ray pulsar tasks it was still competitive but with the GW tasks to be an optimisation issue or the old CPU or memory speed is the bottleneck, the GPU while having a long run time doesn't have much load on it. Yet if I run 2 tasks it's running out of memory slowing the whole system down and with 3 task they run into a compute error after a few minutes.
run two GW tasks at a time,
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run two GW tasks at a time, but stagger them.
the GW tasks have two distinct parts. first part will run on the GPU, the second part will only run on the CPU and leave the GPU idle. start the first task and wait until it reaches the CPU only portion, then switch the system to 2x tasks and start the second task so that it can use the idle GPU while the first task crunches the CPU. it should basically double your output.
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Thanks for the advice, I
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Thanks for the advice, I already tried that, the problem is that the GPU memory is still used up by both tasks and while the Einstein productivity goes up the system slows down a lot. Running out of GPU memory is a general issue I have for a few months now. I don't know the reason for this, and there is nothing that can be done on a Mac to troubleshoot it.
B.I.G wrote: So I have an
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Why not take out the harddrive and put a cheap SSd in it and install Linux on it and get back to crunching, I did it with my cheesegrator Mac and it crunches just fine.
Amicable Numbers supports
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Amicable Numbers supports intel Macs running internal and external AMD GPUs. I have crunched on their behalf in the past, and am currently transitioning back to them.
"I was born in a small town, and I live in a small town." - John Mellencamp
mikey wrote: B.I.G
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This is great advice for someone whose Mac is a cruncher or runs a relatively standard suite of software. Unfortunately, some of my software isn't available for linux or my software licenses can't be transferred to linux. My biggest headache is each of my three MacPro 3,1 and 5,1 computers at work has a static license to an ancient and unsupported (but still quite useful) version of GraphPad Prism for OS X. Replacing those licenses is more expensive than replacing the computers.
"I was born in a small town, and I live in a small town." - John Mellencamp
mikey wrote: Why not take
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Because I need MacOS 10.14 to run some old hardware that still requires 32bit MacOS apps, and also some software that was discontinued by Apple. Otherwise I could have upgraded to more modern macOS and installed more powerful GPUs.
Linux unfortunately is no option at all since I'm in the media business and Linux and anything graphic related doesn't go well together.
Then again, the MacPro was using 400 watts for and got 500k credits a day with the BRP app. My Windows Laptop can get the same credits by using just 100 watts.... And my new windows desktop will probably get double that for 150 watts... add the high energy prices in Europe to that...You can see that most seti.germany members stopped or heavily reduced crunching to a minimum... and nostalgia is all nice but I could buy a Workstation each year for what the additional power consumption of the MacPro compared to a modern PC would cost...