Need some advice..
18 Jan 2011 18:18:59 UTC
Topic 195587
(moderation:
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
Need some advice..
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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
Team Linux Users Everywhere
Hi Thanks for the
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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!
Hi Martin - welcome to the
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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.
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.
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.
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.
RE: RE: ... and can I
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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)
Looks like I'll have to take
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Looks like I'll have to take what's available:
The only other work is for BRP tasks...
Thanks to everyone for their help :)
RE: RE: You wont get this
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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.