Need some advice..

Martin
Martin
Joined: 11 Jan 11
Posts: 22
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Topic 195587

Hi

After a few years and many PC's crunching climate prediction at home, I've decided to share my computing power here at Einstein. :)

To be honest I find it hard to follow any thread here on the forum, they tend to get bogged down in detail mainly to do with GPU and WU's, which I'm no expert on.

Unfortunately I have a ATI GPU which rules me out of some WU's. That however is my question. What WU can I NOT do on my PC, and can I edit my preferences either in Boinc or here, so I don't get the error message:

"Einstein@Home Message from server: Your computer has no NVIDIA GPU"

No kidding! :)

Or can all WU's be processed on GPU's and CPU'S?

Cheers

Michael Karlinsky
Michael Karlinsky
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 888
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Need some advice..

Quote:

Hi

After a few years and many PC's crunching climate prediction at home, I've decided to share my computing power here at Einstein. :)

To be honest I find it hard to follow any thread here on the forum, they tend to get bogged down in detail mainly to do with GPU and WU's, which I'm no expert on.

Unfortunately I have a ATI GPU which rules me out of some WU's. That however is my question. What WU can I NOT do on my PC, and can I edit my preferences either in Boinc or here, so I don't get the error message:

"Einstein@Home Message from server: Your computer has no NVIDIA GPU"

No kidding! :)

Or can all WU's be processed on GPU's and CPU'S?

Cheers

Hi Martin,

welcome to E@H. Above message is no error-message, just a statement of a fact. You can do all WUs. Which WUs you can, or can not crunch, the BOINC server (should) take care of.

You might want to opt out of BRP work, (see your E@H preferences here at the website) because they are rather slow, if done via CPU. But this (obviously) reduces your chances to discover a new pulsar.

HTH
Michael

Martin
Martin
Joined: 11 Jan 11
Posts: 22
Credit: 898829
RAC: 0

Hi Thanks for the

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

I'll just continue accepting all work. As long as I can make a worthwhile contribution, I might as well crunch what I can!

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5874
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Hi Martin - welcome to the

Hi Martin - welcome to the Einstein project. We hope you enjoy your stay here.

Whilst Michael has already answered most parts of your query, there are a couple of extra things you might like to consider.

Quote:
... What WU can I NOT do on my PC ...


There are CPU apps for both searches - Gravity wave (GW) and Binary Radio Pulsar (BRP) searches, so you can crunch all available types of tasks without a supported GPU.

Quote:
... and can I edit my preferences either in Boinc or here, so I don't get the error message ...


You wont get this information message if you go to your account page on the website and click on the E@H preferences and set the "Use nVidia GPU" preference to 'NO', (since you don't have one). I believe this will then stop the information message.

Quote:
Or can all WU's be processed on GPU's and CPU'S?


GW tasks are for CPU only. BRP tasks can use both CPU and GPU if you have a supported (CUDA capable) GPU. There is a considerable speedup for BRP tasks if you have a supported GPU, so much so that it makes a lot of sense to invest in a budget GPU (say a GT240 or a GT430) if you really want to do BRP tasks and increase your chances of (re-)discovering a pulsar :-). Unfortunately, ATI GPUs are not going to be supported any time soon (if ever).

I notice that your host is an AMD Phenom II X4. Phenom II's (in fact all types of AMD CPUs) are a bit more efficient at crunching GW tasks - they seem to do a somewhat better job than Intel CPUs of similar vintage and spec. On the other hand, Intels seem to be a bit better with the pulsar search app. For this reason, I would suggest you consider setting your prefs to accept only GW tasks on your AMD host.

Cheers,
Gary.

Gundolf Jahn
Gundolf Jahn
Joined: 1 Mar 05
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RE: RE: ... and can I

Quote:
Quote:
... and can I edit my preferences either in Boinc or here, so I don't get the error message ...

You wont get this information message if you go to your account page on the website and click on the E@H preferences and set the "Use nVidia GPU" preference to 'NO', (since you don't have one). I believe this will then stop the information message.


I believe that won't help. That preference tells the client not to ask for nVidia tasks, but since it has an ATI GPU, it will continue to ask for GPU tasks and be told that there aren't any suitable ones. However, I'm just speculating here (again;-).

Gruß,
Gundolf

Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Martin
Martin
Joined: 11 Jan 11
Posts: 22
Credit: 898829
RAC: 0

Looks like I'll have to take

Looks like I'll have to take what's available:

Quote:
19/01/2011 15:21:19 Einstein@Home Message from server: No work is available for Global Correlations S5 search #1
19/01/2011 15:21:19 Einstein@Home Message from server: No work is available for Global Correlations S5 HF search #1

The only other work is for BRP tasks...

Thanks to everyone for their help :)

Jord
Joined: 26 Jan 05
Posts: 2952
Credit: 5893653
RAC: 4

RE: RE: You wont get this

Quote:
Quote:
You wont get this information message if you go to your account page on the website and click on the E@H preferences and set the "Use nVidia GPU" preference to 'NO', (since you don't have one). I believe this will then stop the information message.

I believe that won't help. That preference tells the client not to ask for nVidia tasks, but since it has an ATI GPU, it will continue to ask for GPU tasks and be told that there aren't any suitable ones. However, I'm just speculating here (again;-).


That's correct. To get the project to stop sending the message, it would need a "Use ATI GPU" option on the same page. However, since there's no application for ATI cards on this project this option doesn't get enabled by default.

I believe that the project developers can override this and enable the "Use ATI GPU" option by hand.

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