OpenCL on ATI keeps copying stuff

Piruzzolo
Piruzzolo
Joined: 2 Sep 20
Posts: 2
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Topic 223419

I'm on Windows, see here.

I'm monitoring GPU activity on Windows Task Manager. GW-opencl-ati tasks begin with ca. 100% "Compute 1" activity, with 0% "Copy" activity, low dedicated RAM.

After a while, it stops "Compute 1" and begins "Copy" activity, as shown in the attached screenshot.

see screenshot

 

It may be a bug, not really sure.  It goes on doing the work though, so dunno

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5851
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Piruzzolo wrote:I'm

Piruzzolo wrote:
I'm monitoring GPU activity on Windows Task Manager. GW-opencl-ati tasks begin with ca. 100% "Compute 1" activity, with 0% "Copy" activity, low dedicated RAM.

Hi Piruzzolo, welcome to Einstein!

I don't use Windows at all so have no experience with what you see but I can tell you (from the experience of others as well as my own) that your HD8500M series GPU will not be able to crunch the GW-opencl-ati tasks.  They might give the appearance of running but if you let them continue, they will eventually error out with a "TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED" type of message, after essentially making no real progress.  You have aborted one and your best bet is to abort the remainder, AFTER you change your preferences (account -> preferences -> project) to disable the GW 02 Multi-Directional GPU Search.

You should be aware that crunching puts a heavy thermal load on your computer.  Since the 8500M is a mobile type GPU designation, I imagine it's in a laptop.  You should be very careful to limit the amount of work you try to take on and monitor temperatures closely.  Laptop cooling systems are quite often not able to cope with high intensity crunching.

Your GPU belongs to the 1st generation of the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture that first came out in around 2011, so it's quite old architecture, even though it was still being used and sold some years later.  It should be quite suitable to use it for the Gamma-ray pulsar GPU search.  I would advise you to try that search completely on its own with ALL other searches deselected.  Once you establish the performance with that search, and had made sure you didn't have a heat problem, you could enable a CPU search, but in a limited way.  You could change your compute preferences to allow BOINC to use 25% of your CPU cores so that (to start with) you would only be crunching 1 CPU task for whatever CPU search you chose to use.  If your machine was still able to cope with that extra load, you could try 50% of cores.  I would strongly advise not to go further than that.

Please ask if you have any questions about any of the above.

Cheers,
Gary.

Piruzzolo
Piruzzolo
Joined: 2 Sep 20
Posts: 2
Credit: 22495086
RAC: 0

Thanks Gary! I've just

Thanks Gary! I've just disabled  GW 02 Multi-Directional GPU Search, thanks for the hints!

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5851
Credit: 110707382024
RAC: 32029761

You're most welcome!

You're most welcome!

Cheers,
Gary.

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