MilkyWay@Home for GPUs

[vaughan]

Does anyone have a summary of how to get an ATI Radeon 4870 card to work on milkyway@home?

I used to have it running under Win XP 64 but now the card is in a Win 7 64 Ultimate machine. The BOINC application data folder wasn't visible but my son did some magic tweaking and managed to get it visible for me - dunno what he did, it was all too quick for this old man.

Now I know where to paste the app_info.xml file plus the other two files from the optimised app. However, when I rebooted after installing the latest Catalyst drivers and started BOINC, milkyway just gives computation errors.

I looked at the milkyway site and the optimised apps messages folder is enormous so I'm after a working summary of "what to do" rather than the development blog that is the milkyway message board.

[AMDave]

I gleaned this little gem out of the ATI support thread.

under Vista/Win7 all Catalyst releases run if the appropriate dlls are copied and renamed as described in the readme.

It looks like there are some specifics that you need to accomplish/re-accomplish for your Win7 install.

Look for the "readme' file in the download pack.

BTW they just moved the download location for the optimized clients:
according to this thread:
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/...?id=1297#34213
they are now here
http://www.arkayn.us/milkyway/index.html

[vaughan]

Thank you AMDave.

Tracking down the dlls that needed re-naming was a chore. Michael resorted to using Locate32 to find them, made the copies and we renamed them. Milkyway still misbehaved so I switched to Collatz and its running perfectly.

I don't understand why BOINC changed the location of the critical BOINC files some versions ago. Now under Win 7 they're very hard to find.

[AMDave]

A few people had reported having problems with newer Cat drivers.
Some also reported that there was no problem.
The difference in the reports, as I recall, was the different ATI GPU model.

It may be that the MW ATI client code has not yet meshed with the latest ATI (h/w) and Cat (s/w) changes and might work better with an older driver.
If you have the desire to test, you could try rolling back to previous versions to test that report.

I have not had great success with downgrade tests.
They tend to affect things that you didn't want to change.
For me 1 out of 5 downgrade tests worked when I did my CUDA tests and most caused me various kinds of desktop trouble afterwards.
The final solution was a complete upgrade - firmware, driver and kernel - getting the matching set to line up.

But since you have a working instance, I'd roll with that for a while.

Re Win7, I am surprised to say that I have not met it face-to-face yet...anywhere, and in my day to day work I only ever see 1 single install of Vista, on a laptop that a co-worker brings to work to listen to music. The 'wow' and the uptake have been profoundly non-existent. I am however finding contracted and supported linux boxen and FOSS apps becoming written into 'policy' and appearing in interesting and important places. It seems that the seeds of change that were once sown have germinated. "We live in interesting times", to quote the good T. Pratchett.

[BlackAdder]

Hi all, I've been running the Milky Way project on my HD4870 the last couple of days and I am receiving 213.76 credits for 3 minutes and 5 seconds of work. Not bad... but I did notice it heats up my card worse that folding at home does, even with the fan at 100% it still runs about 73C. I'm now looking into a aftermarket cooler....