Discussion Thread for the Continuous GW Search known as O2MD1 (now O2MDF - GPUs only)

Trotador
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Vega 64 and RX70 seem to be

Vega 64 and RX70 seem to be crunching Ok at x4 wu at once but Radeon VII does not, GPU doesn't get loaded even with 6 wus, Could be my setup but FGRPB1G and milky crunch OK. All in Ubuntu.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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B.I.G wrote:... hope the devs

B.I.G wrote:
... hope the devs manage to fix this. I'd love to crunch GW tasks.

Please be realistic :-).  How could the Devs fix your setup?  You need to identify what's wrong with your system.

A good thing to start with would be to run the clinfo utility (if you don't have it installed, go find it) and see exactly what OpenCL platforms are reported.  There's lots of output but the platforms you have will be identified quite early in the output..  For example, here's what I see for an RX 570.

Number of platforms:                             1
  Platform Profile:                              FULL_PROFILE
  Platform Version:                              OpenCL 2.1 AMD-APP (2671.3)
  Platform Name:                                 AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
  Platform Vendor:                               Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
  Platform Extensions:                           cl_khr_icd cl_amd_event_callback cl_amd_offline_devices

  Platform Name:                                 AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
Number of devices:                               1
  Device Type:                                   CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU
  Vendor ID:                                     1002h
  Board name:                                    Radeon RX 570 Series
  Device Topology:                               PCI[ B#7, D#0, F#0 ]
  Max compute units:                             32

It could well be that you might need a more recent version of OpenCL.  Notice mine says 2.1.  I'm pretty sure you would be best to ensure your version is at least 1.2.  I think there could well be stuff in later versions that might improve your performance.

Let's just start by seeing what you actually have.  If it needs upgrading, that will be out of my league for something like MacOS.

Cheers,
Gary.

B.I.G
B.I.G
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Couldn't find clinfo utility

Couldn't find clinfo utility for macOS but according to Apple macOS is using Open CL 1.2 

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823

And there is the Problem: I can't update Open CL, I can't fix the System it is as provided by Apple. Either Apple got it right or wrong. This is not Linux or Windows.

Keith Myers
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I thought that Apple is

I thought that Apple is abandoning both OpenGL and OpenCL and going with their closed Metal API for all current and future MacOS releases.  Distributed computing is at an end on Apple hardware as far as I can see.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/opengl-opencl-deprecated-in-favor-of-metal-2-in-macos-1014-mojave

And the same goes for CUDA. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=84805&postid=2020081

 

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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B.I.G wrote:Couldn't find

B.I.G wrote:
Couldn't find clinfo utility for macOS but according to Apple macOS is using Open CL 1.2.

A quick google search reveals that OpenCL 1.2 (which includes the clinfo utility) is installed in High Sierra up to at least 10.13.4.  I also saw an actual Apple page which said that existing OpenCL apps would still run in 10.14.  How well such apps might run is quite another matter.

You should not expect BOINC projects to be able to do anything about this.  You should complain directly to Apple - not that that tactic would be likely to make any difference.  I don't know the current status but there used to be a BOINC developer who tweaked stuff so that BOINC could run properly on Apple products.  Maybe someone over at BOINC might know if BOINC still properly detects and deals with all the different hardware in Apple systems, particularly hardware needing OpenCL support.

Individual projects rely on BOINC to properly detect the hardware capabilities.  BOINC relies on the OS/drivers to get that information.  Anyone contributing to BOINC with MacOS in mind should know the true situation, which is why asking on the BOINC boards might get you better information.

Did you even try opening a command prompt (terminal window) and issuing the clinfo command?

Cheers,
Gary.

Logforme
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I have a question about the

I have a question about the CPU usage of the O2MDF app. I tried searching to see if it's been answered before but I found nothing.

On this machine that have 4 CPU cores I used to have "Use at most: 100% of the processors" and "GPU utilization factor" set to 1.0.

With the FGRPB1G app this resulted in 1 GPU task and 3 CPU tasks running. Each app getting one core, everyone is getting resources.

With the O2MDF app this resulted in 1 GPU task and 4 CPU tasks running. This would starve the GPU app of CPU resources and cause it to be very slow.

So nowadays I have to set "Use at most: 95% of the processors" which results in 1 O2MDF task and 3 CPU tasks. The problem is that when a FGRPB1G task comes along (not often, the O2MDF tasks dominate) the machine will only run 1 FGRPB1G task and 2 CPU tasks.

Is this working as intended?

Have I missed something in the configuration?

Jim1348
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Logforme wrote:Is this

Logforme wrote:

Is this working as intended?

Have I missed something in the configuration?

Yes, that is as intended.  It is because FGRPB1G reserves a whole CPU core when it is running:

Einstein@Home    1.20 Gamma-ray pulsar binary search #1 on GPUs (FGRPopencl1K-nvidia)  1C + 1 NVIDIA GPU  

Whereas O2MDF reserves only 0.9 of a CPU core.

You can fix that by using an app_config.xml file to force the O2MDF to use a whole core also, but I have not done it in a while.  I am sure someone here can give you a sample.

Richie
Richie
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If you want to restrict CPU

If you want to restrict CPU tasks only to FGRP5 then here's one kind of example that might work for you:

<app_config>
<app>
<name>hsgamma_FGRP5</name>
<max_concurrent>3</max_concurrent>
</app>
<app>
<name>hsgamma_FGRPB1G</name>
<max_concurrent>1</max_concurrent>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>1</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>1</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>
<app>
<name>einstein_O2MDF</name>
<max_concurrent>1</max_concurrent>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>1</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>1</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>
</app_config>

Logforme
Logforme
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Jim1348 wrote:Yes, that is as

Jim1348 wrote:

Yes, that is as intended.  It is because FGRPB1G reserves a whole CPU core when it is running:

Whereas O2MDF reserves only 0.9 of a CPU core.

Yes I did notice the 1.0 and 0.9 values.

I just find it strange that with 3 CPU tasks and 1 O2MDF task the math becomes:

3 * 1.0 + 1 * 0.9 = 3.9 ... Hmm .. we have 4.0 so lets start another 1.0 task. But I guess that's a Boinc issue, not E@H.

What's the rationale behind the 0.9 value for O2MDF? Why not 1.0?

Richie
Richie
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Richie wrote:Nvidia...I

Richie wrote:
Nvidia...I recall 700-series doesn't work... everything from Kepler is incompatible ?

I saw a host with GT 630 2GB (Fermi chip, GF108) and it had successful validations under Windows.

https://einsteinathome.org/host/11687949

Outcome:Success

Validation state:Valid

OpenCL Device used for Search/Recalc and/or semi coherent step: 'GeForce GT 630 (Platform: NVIDIA CUDA, global memory: 2048 MiB)

Fermi is even older than Kepler. I would assume now that at least some of the 600- and 700-series cards are compatible. GT 650M was reported to work under Mac and it has Kepler GK107 indeed. But six different chips have been used in Kepler cards and desktop models up from GTX 660 were different in that way to GT 650M.

Some kind of lower bound for Nvidia compatibility may lie somewhere in Fermi architecture.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=Fermi&sort=generation

 

Quote:
But how about GTX 750 (Ti) ? It has Maxwell 'first generation' chip.

Somebody had been running these tasks with GTX 750 Ti and it worked well.

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