[New release] BRP app v1.22 feedback thread

choks
choks
Joined: 24 Feb 05
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Hi Once the jobs has been

Message 79127 in response to message 79126

Hi

Once the jobs has been loaded and a couple were aborted, I disabled requesting new jobs, changed and waited for the remaining jobs to complete.

It looks this is no more required because the jobs I got today are processing OK, so it looks fixed.

Christophe

pragmatic prancing periodic problem child, left
pragmatic pranc...
Joined: 26 Jan 05
Posts: 153
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WUID 47277, run time:

Message 79128 in response to message 79124

WUID 47277, run time: 29,286.40 seconds.
WUID 46805, run time: 39,079.57 seconds.
WUID 46559, run time: 4,538.00 seconds.

47277 has this:

[00:38:31][368][INFO ] Checkpoint committed!
Activated exception handling...
[02:14:57]


46805 has this:

[04:51:58][3600][INFO ] Checkpoint committed!
Activated exception handling...
[21:55:34]


And from there on in, they slow down. 46559 ran from start to finish without exception handling (aka a break), and as such it ran in 'normal' time.

Now, the troubling thing is that it doesn't do this with all tasks. WUID 47791 has a run time of 6,306.80 seconds, yet it also has this:

[00:47:25][4336][INFO ] Checkpoint committed!
Activated exception handling...
[00:48:18]


That was a BOINC exit & restart. The other two were stops of the task itself while BOINC continued running.

Christoph
Christoph
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I have an

I have an invalid.
http://albertathome.org/task/140891

Oh, and the long runtimes which Ageless has are normal to me. I will set NNT to other projects to see if the times go down when my tasks run in one go.

Christoph

Trog Dog
Trog Dog
Joined: 25 Nov 05
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RE: All 1.22 wu's are

Message 79130 in response to message 79122

Quote:

All 1.22 wu's are erroring out with max time elapsed http://albert.phys.uwm.edu/results.php?userid=128605&offset=0&show_names=0&state=5&appid=

running on boinc 7.0.20 ati drivers 12.2

Looks like it was the client at fault, upgraded to 7.0.23 & I have a wu in progress

Infusioned
Infusioned
Joined: 11 Feb 05
Posts: 38
Credit: 149000
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I have been away for a bit

Message 79131 in response to message 79130

I have been away for a bit due to my motherboard dying, and when I got back up and running with the rebuild I was waiting for 7.0.25 to go live so I could run Milkway with Albert without using a beta version for a live project.

So, poking through my WU times, I am hovering at ~ 5900 GPU seconds, and ~ 3,200 CPU seconds per WU.

AMD Phenom II x4 975 (couldn't find an 1100T for non-ripoff prices and am waiting for Piledriver [not happy with Bulldozer])
AMD HD 6950
8G DDR3 1600
Win 7 x64
Boinc 7.0.25

This WU vs. i2600k Sandybridge/550Ti shows the 2600k coming in at 1/3 the time of my cpu. However, Anandtech Bench does not show the 2600k as 66% faster. Also, wikipedia shows the AMD HD6950 SP GFLOPS at 2253 and the NVIDIA GTX 55Ti SP GFLOPS at 691.2, but the 550Ti time is 2/3 of mine.

So, my question is, what gives? Is the OpenCL app that unoptimized compared to the CUDA app?

robertmiles
robertmiles
Joined: 16 Nov 11
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I've seen a message elsewhere

Message 79132 in response to message 79131

I've seen a message elsewhere saying that OpenCL workunits tend to need much more CPU use than running similar workunits using CUDA. This implies that slow CPUs will slow down OpenCL workunits much more than they slow down CUDA workunits.

Infusioned
Infusioned
Joined: 11 Feb 05
Posts: 38
Credit: 149000
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RE: This implies that slow

Message 79133 in response to message 79132

Quote:
This implies that slow CPUs will slow down OpenCL workunits much more than they slow down CUDA workunits.

Understood. However, that's why I checked Anandtech's benchmarks to see just how much faster the 2600k was than my cpu. The benchmarks do not reflect a 66% performance difference so there is something else going on.

Also, unless I read the charts wrong, comparing the GFLOPS between the two video cards, theoretically the 6950 should smoke the 550Ti in SP output (2253 vs. 691.2).

So, back to my original question, is the OpenCL app that unoptimized compared to the CUDA app?

Infusioned
Infusioned
Joined: 11 Feb 05
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Here is a WU from Seti@Home

Message 79134 in response to message 79133

Here is a WU from Seti@Home Beta's OpenCL application:

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta/workunit.php?wuid=3973426

I am 58327 and someone with a GTX 590 GPU, Intel 2600k CPU, Cuda OpenCL client is 56759.

My CPU seconds are 1463 and theirs are 2061.
My GPU seconds are 3244 and theirs are 2198.

My CPU time is actually lower (75%) of the 2600k, but my GPU time is ~150% of the GTX 590 (which again, is curious, given the GFLOP numbers).

My conclusion from all this is then, that the Albert AMD OpenCL application isn't as quite as optimized as the Albert CUDA application. Can anyone confirm/deny?

Falconet
Falconet
Joined: 20 Jan 12
Posts: 1
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Hmm the OpenCl app uses a

Hmm the OpenCl app uses a full CPU core to work.
IS there any way to lower that usage?

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Joined: 28 Aug 06
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RE: Hmm the OpenCl app uses

Message 79136 in response to message 79135

Quote:
Hmm the OpenCl app uses a full CPU core to work.
IS there any way to lower that usage?

Quote:
Hmm the OpenCl app uses a full CPU core to work.
IS there any way to lower that usage?

Hi!

In terms of CPU usage, the OpenCL app should in theory be comparable to the NVIDIA/CUDA app, but we have seen huge differences in CPU usage with different driver versions from ATI. So the only advice I can give now is to try different drivers, sorry. Please let us know any results for your card (e.g. which driver worked better wrt CPU usage).

From the previous message:

Quote:
My conclusion from all this is then, that the Albert AMD OpenCL application isn't as quite as optimized as the Albert CUDA application. Can anyone confirm/deny?

It's fair to say that the CUDA app is more optimized to NVIDIA cards than the OpenCL app is optimized to ATI cards, yes. This has several reasons:

* OpenCL is a multi-vendor platform while CUDA is NVIDIA only. If you write OpenCL code you want to keep the vendor-independence. It would be great if we could have just one code basis, it has to be seen whether this will be realistic without too much impact on performance on either platform.

* The OpenCL app for the pulsar search is a port of the CUDA app which came out first of course, so it's not specifically tuned to the strengths of ATI cards...yet

* The first priority is, needless to say, to get the app to a point where it runs on all our target platforms (OSX, Linux, Windows) and produces scientifically sound results that cross-validate with the CUDA and CPU apps. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the level of support (tools, libraries, bugfixing, drivers...) is certainly more mature for CUDA/NVIDIA than for OpenCL/ATI, so almost all our efforts currently have to be directed into "making it work at all" and less can be spent on "optimizing".

On the other hand the ATI cards are, without any questions, fine pieces of hardware! So I'm quite optimistic that already the first OpenCL app that will
go into production on E@H will have a decent performance/Watt ratio.

Stay tuned and thanks for helping us test the thing here on Albert@Home!

HBE

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