Multiple characters being types or keystrokes missed when using GPU
28 Oct 2018 21:53:16 UTC
Topic 216743
(moderation:
When running Einstein GPU tasks like the gamma-ray pulsar search, my keyboard and mouse action become erratic. I have dialled bonic back to allow CPU headroom but when running GPU tasks get multiple repeat keystrokes when typing or it seems to miss some as well. The mouse moves become erratic too. My setup has a Ryzen 5 1600 APU and Gigabyte Radeon RX 550 Series (POLARIS12 / DRM 3.26.0 / 4.18.16-200.fc28.x86_64, LLVM 6.0.1) running Fedora 28.
Welcome to Einstein@Home! I
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Welcome to Einstein@Home!
I run linux on all my hosts and many have Polaris GPUs - from RX 460 to RX 580. I don't have any 550s but for the ones I do run, I've never noticed any effect on keyboard or mouse usability. My distro of choice is PCLinuxOS and I run the full KDE5 Plasma desktop. If I use any of the machines for other activities like browsing, installing sofware updates, etc, I don't notice any adverse effects.
Your computers are 'hidden' - which is standard these days since E@H is based in Hannover in Germany and subject to the GDRP. To assist in trying to work out what might be wrong, it would be useful if you choose to 'unhide' your computers through a preference setting or at least provide a link to the details page on the website for your Ryzen 5. One thing in particular I'd like to check is if both GPUs are crunching and what the CPU and elapsed times look like for each one. I'd also like to see if you are crunching CPU tasks as well and if so, how many cores are running such tasks.
I don't understand what you mean by this. There are two different preference settings you might be talking about. One refers to % of processors and the other to % of time. Can you say which one you have changed and what value you have used? If it's neither of these, then what have you changed? How many threads does BOINC detect and how many are actually running CPU tasks?
Cheers,
Gary.
Aside from the important
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Aside from the important matters Gary mentioned regarding total numbers of tasks, there is, at least in Windows, a readily discernible impact from the priority at which the CPU support task required by each GPU task runs.
At various times I've noticed specific applications to be impaired in running with GPU tasks also running, and in some epochs been able to get considerable improvement by raising the priority of the suffering task, lowering the priority of the GPU support tasks, or both. In more extreme cases it can help to corral GPU support to only run on a subset of the available CPU cores. In the worst case I have improved interactive performance for a few minutes by temporarily suspending the Einstein work.
Again, speaking of Windows (which may not be your environment), one can make some experimental one-time priority and affinity adjustments in Process Explorer. Durable adjustments by name of executable we usually make use of Process Lasso.
My experience is unlike Gary's but so are my machines. I've got Nvidia cards (Pascal generation) running an Einstein OpenCL Windows application under Windows 10. Yes, I've seen obvious impairments rather often, but generally been able to manage them satisfactorily.
Now if you are running AMD cards under Linux, please ignore my comments on this matter.