Hi All,

I have never posted before but I thought I would share my experience from my Easter weekend fiddle session.

I saw that SETI now uses CUDA as of the last couple of versions, I don’t normally run SETI on my work station/game rig but I had to give it a shot as I have both a 9800GT (gfx) and a 8600GT (physx) sitting in there.

I have to say I was mighty impressed, I installed the new client and out of the box it used each video card to crunch a work unit along with 3 of my cpu cores.

These days I normally run SETI exclusively on my server, but I could not help but think.... the 8600GT uses only little more power then the CPU in my server (old single core am2 Sempron) but alone it seamed to be getting though the work units 10x quicker and earning 3x the credit for each one.....

So I liberated the 8600GT from my game rig and put it in the server... that’s when I discovered that SETI won’t run CUDA as a service. doh! Also I was unable to remote desktop in to the server because Windows replaces the NVIDIA display drivers with its own. Double doh!. I spent an hour or 2 on Google but the best I could come up with to use a VNC variant rather then windows remote desk top.

Not happy with this solution I set out to find a way have my server run SETI using CUDA but also retain the ability to remote desktop in.

This is the solution I came up with, it works for XP32, I assume something similar will work for other OS's. Steps:

1. Create a windows account that will run BOINC. For security I locked this account down so basically that’s all it can do. You might also want to confirm that BOINC is getting CUDA work units as well.

2. Set windows to log in automatically with the BOINC account, if you are not sure how to do this follow these Instructions. Confirm that when Windows boots it always logs in using the BOINC account.

If you don’t want to use remote desktop this is as far as you need to go... I assume most people have worked this much out already though.

3. The last step to get remote desktop working is to apply this Work Around (or hack if you will).

With this hack it will let you run the BOINC user (which keeps the NVIDIA drivers alive) as a real session at the same time that the remote user is connected.

You might also want to play with your power saving settings to make sure you video card(s) are not getting turned off.

So now my server is crunching 10x more SETI work units then before but the CPU is hardly being used at all. Because they CPU is now free I am able to let SETI run 24/7 (I used to have it set not to run a couple of hours each day while the server was backing up and virus scanning). The internet seems a little faster as well now that the server’s CPU is free.

My only problem now... I don’t have a Physx card... So I might have to buy a gtx295 or something and use the 9800GT as a Physx card... =P

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Oops, I just realized I put this in the wrong place, a mode might want to move it to the CUDA Q&A board.

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