MacOS GPU workunits?
23 Dec 2017 19:39:37 UTC
Topic 212138
(moderation:
Hi all - Happy Holidays!
I'm a long time cruncher, but when the Mac GPU work units dried up, I stopped crunching since my machines were woefully slow on the CPU work units. What's the status on using Nvidia cards on MacOS High Sierra? I've checked periodically by starting up BOINC, but never get any work units.
I'm also getting a new iMac Pro, which will have an AMD GPU. Are there GPU work units for OpenCL?
jd_3 wrote:... but when the
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There have never been specific "MAC GPU work units". There used to be work that used the CUDA capabilities of nvidia cards (irrespective of OS) but these days all work for discrete GPUs (both nvidia and AMD) uses OpenCL. I notice your machine has a GTX 970. I know very little about MACs, but if you were able to install OpenCL libs on your machine, your GTX 970 should be able to get work. You will need to research the availability of OpenCL libs for your machine/OS version.
Without BOINC detecting the presence of OpenCL libs on your machine, you'll never get a positive response from the scheduler.
All GPU work for AMD or nvidia uses OpenCL. BOINC just needs to be able to detect that OpenCL is available (installed libs) for you to be able to get work for either type of card. The card just has to have a minimum of 1GB RAM that BOINC can detect as 'available'.
Cheers,
Gary.
Have you tried installing the
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Have you tried installing the CUDA drivers for OS X?
http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html
Click Here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats
Still running Sierra but
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Still running Sierra but everything is fine for me with Workunits for my GTX 780. Did you check your project settings? GPU Work is allowed? GUP not suspended? What does the eventlog (Command-Shift-E) say when you request newwork?
When running BOINC on the new iMacPro consider that these machines are designer computers and not meant for high workloads over a long time. The CPU and GPU is already customised to be slower than the PC counterparts so they use less power because the cooling system is at it's limit.
I very much recommend to install a monitoring utility for the GPU and CPU temperature and maybe you'll need to make either the fan spin faster or reduce the number of allowed tasks. If you have the GPU only running the machine should manage it, if you allow CPU work as well my guess is that it'd overheat.
You should be getting GPU
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You should be getting GPU work units. Do you have the latest driver for the NVIDIA GTX970? I am guessing you are using the web drivers from NVIDIA or it probably isn't working correctly (the 970 is not supported by OS X natively IIRC).
OpenCL is built in. If you have GPU computing enabled, it should be pulling the units.
The only catch here is that this project does not efficiently use NVIDIA GPUs on the Mac. This is not an NVIDIA or Apple problem, since the same card will run just as well as Linux and Windows on other projects, but the same machine using the same card gets double the productivity on Windows 10 than it does on Mac here.
Nevertheless, I encourage you to crunch here so we Mac/NVIDIA users get taken seriously and the developers get around to making our client more efficient.
I recommend iStat Nano to
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I recommend iStat Nano to monitor your temps. I've been running other iMacs on this project for over a decade, and as long as you watch the temps everything will be ok. I also recommend blowing it out at least annually because dust and lint will start to suck up into the machine and block your heat sink and fans.
The current Mac GPU work
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The current Mac GPU work units here use OpenCL, not CUDA, so that won't do it. But if the original poster is using an NVIDIA GTX 970 they will need to use drivers from NVIDIA for that and not the ones that come with High Sierra. The video output will be better as well.
https://images.nvidia.com/mac/pkg/378/WebDriver-378.10.10.10.25.103.pkg
or http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-us
Also JD, the iMac Pro looks
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Also JD, the iMac Pro looks like it can come with an AMD Vega 56 or Vega 64. That will absolutely CRUSH work units here. Although the NVIDIA work units suck on the Mac here, the Mac/AMD work just as well as they do on Linux and Windows.
From what I've seen, you should see about 1.2million points a day from your GPU alone depending on which model you get and how you configure it. You will probably need to set it up to process multiple work units at the same time to get the most out of it.
I am running 3 work units simultaneously on my AMD R9 280X. Though it is running each individual work unit slower than if I ran only one, it is doing 3 concurrently much faster than it could do 3 sequentially.
I think you will be quite pleased with your iMac Pro on this project.