Albert@home News

[AMDave]

Updated OpenCL requirements
The minimum BOINC client version for OpenCL tasks got raised to 7.0.1 (get it here (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php)) as it fixes an important bug.Cheers,Oliver

More... (http://albert.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=8845)

[AMDave]

I am testing this tonight under Ubuntu 11.10 AMD64.
NOTE: there has been another patch update to the BOINC Client so the version number is now 7.0.2
BOINC Client 7.0.2 is working ok so far.
Existing work in the queue is processing ok after the upgrade.
Albert added ok.
The new boinc client is now downloading the Albert atiOpenCL project client. Slow going.

[AMDave]

/edit -
I didn't really explain the problem from above.
I had BOINC 7.0.2 running briefly on Ubuntu 11.10, using symbolic links to get it working, but the Albert WUs would not start.
I tried reloading BOINC 7.0.2 but that version of BOINC failed to start every time after that.
It has dependencies on newer versions of packages, like OpenSSL 1.0.0, that are not available yet in the distro repository.
The distro is still using libssl.so.0.9.8
Frustrating.
- edit/

After several failed attempts to get BOINC 7.0.2 (DEV) working under Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, I have returned an Albert OpenCL result under Win7-64.
The GPGPU was a HD 5770, latest AMD driver version available 11.12, BOINC client is development version 7.0.2
The standard 500 coblestones was awarded.
Run time was 30,744.65 seconds
CPU time was 1,304.54 seconds
So I make that just over 9 points per 10 minute period.
Barely better than a CPU but using bucket-loads more power.
The completion time is not quite 1 quarter of one of CPU-core's completion time on the same machine.
But the CPU has 6 cores and so can still beat the snot out of the OpenCL performance on the HD 5770.
Not really worth it then. Well, not with the current AMD Catalyst driver anyway.

[AMDave]

Pushing the boundaries.
Upgraded DN06 to BOINC 7.0.2 on Ubuntu 11.10 and it is working.
The GPGPU is ye olde NVIDIA 9600GT 512MB
The WU wont start unless all other GPU taks are out of GPU memory (ie completed) and BOINC is restarted to re-evaluate the higher amount of RAM available.
So GPU task switching is out of the question.
All other apps must be closed so the available GPU memory is maximised.
Even RPC-ing to the client remotely caused it to pause.
It seems as though it is intermittently getting just enough GPU-RAM to run.
Now processing time has jumped up from 6 seconds to 8 minutes and 7 seconds.
The 9600GT might actually work! =O
If I can keep the user off the machine for long enough, it's possible this WU might complete :P

[AMDave]

Now at 44:26 and running.
Teaching an old dog new tricks
Old hardware can be exciting :)

/edit - as I suspected. at 1hr 15 mins, 70% completed. It's going to knock the smile off the HD 5770. - edit/

[AMDave]

1 x error while downloading
1 x pending validation
1 x error while computing

[23:40:33][7802][ERROR] Error freeing CUDA HS device memory (error: 700)
[23:40:33][7802][ERROR] Demodulation failed (error: 1010)!
23:40:33 (7802): called boinc_finish
keep in mid that this is experimental, so this is quite good so far. :)

plenty more have downloaded successfully.
It's now time to wait and see how they go on the 9600GT.

I saw an intriguing trend in the ATI HD 5770 WUs.
the first finished at 33k+ seconds
the second finished at 28K+seconds
the third finished at 11k+ seconds
I'm waiting on the fourth to see where this is going.