Enable control of each GPU in the system separately
6 Apr 2017 17:40:35 UTC
Topic 206685
(moderation:
I would personally love to see an option in BOINC in general of having control over each GPU in my system separately. For instance, I have a GTX 970 and an R9 380 in my system, I would like to be able to snooze each GPU individually. That way I could snooze one in order to watch something or play a game maybe while the rest of my system can continue working for BOINC.
Stevan Radovic wrote:... an
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As you say, it's a BOINC option so if the current options don't really do what you want, you should make the request at the BOINC forums or mailing lists where you might find someone more likely to be able and willing to help.
You already have a couple of options to exclude individual GPUs as part of the client configuration options that you can set through a cc_config.xml file. Two options are <exclude_gpu>....</exclude_gpu> and <ignore_xxx_gpu>N</ignore_xxx_gpu> where xxx is a particular brand and N is the device number to be ignored. Both of these are a bit inconvenient as you would need to edit the cc_config.xml file and restart BOINC each time you wanted to disable or re-enable a particular GPU. I've never needed to do this but on reading the docs, it seems quite doable already with those existing options.
If I was in your position with two different brands of GPU, I'd consider just manually suspending the tasks belonging to the GPU you wanted to 'turn off for a period' whilst you used that GPU for something else. If you kept a reasonable work cache size, it wouldn't be too onerous to select all the particular tasks for that GPU and suspend them. That GPU would stop crunching and you could play your game. The tasks could remain selected in BOINC Manager so a single click later would re-enable them all when you finished gaming. You wouldn't need to stop and restart BOINC.
Cheers,
Gary.
This sounds like an easy and
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This sounds like an easy and valid request, and is asked occasionally. However, implementing it requires to change BOINC's fundamental concept of GPUs (due to a somewhat unfortunate design decision), and thus would require changes to the client, the server and even the underlying database. I don't think that this will happen in the foreseeable future.
BM
Stevan Radovic wrote:I would
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This is kind of why alot of us have multiple pc's, so we can spread out our resources and tweak them on each machine individually. I did it because I want to contribute to multiple projects, but the principle is the same, to be able to use each resource as I want to, not how someone else decides I should be able to.