Astropulse not using GPU anymore

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bill

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Message 1456219 - Posted: 21 Dec 2013, 20:55:43 UTC - in response to Message 1456171.  
Last modified: 21 Dec 2013, 20:57:28 UTC

So after waiting a few days I decided to go ahead and update my drivers to the absolute newest that is offered for the HD 6870. After my comp cleared the tasks that were most current it updated and now I am swimming in work for my graphics card to do. Only one of them is astropulse, but I guess some of the SETI workunits have been designed to work with the newer catalyst drivers. Thanks everyone for the help!! :)


For your information, astropulse wu are not created from the tapes
all the time and then at a ratio of something like 1 AP to every 25+
MB. And since AP 'pay' a bit better than MB you have to compete
against all the people that crunch AP only for the maximum credits
they can possibly accrue. And they tend to run multiple machines to do it.

You can set your preferences to AP only to try and get more AP when you
get enough of the MB wus to suit you. If your not trying to get the max
credit that you possibly can, the best all around preference setting, IMO,
would be to check mark AP then check mark "If no work for selected
applications is available, accept work from other applications?".
That way it will download AP first if there are any to download at that moment, then download MB if not.
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triplemmm

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Message 1456918 - Posted: 23 Dec 2013, 23:49:52 UTC

So do I have this correct, AP's wu are generated by the splitters and not readily available. Then when they are available they go to those who have doctored their Bonic to only accept AP wu so they can have a higher credit value. Mean while those of us with GPU capabilities have next to not chance of using our GPU for AP wu and are then only left with normal low credit wu.
I have mentioned before that I do not receive many AP wu and now I find out that this maybe because all the AP's that bump up the credit value go to only a certain few greedy high credit seekers. Well I have been on Seti since 2000 and run my PC 24/7 to acheive 1.6 mill credits and its obvious that this is modest compared to others and the greedy high credit seekers. I think with the new year approaching it is time to re-evaluate supporting seti, and its time to let the greedy high credit seekers do all the work.
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Message 1456932 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 0:22:26 UTC - in response to Message 1456918.  

The splitters can only hold 100 workunits in their queue at any given time. Everyone has an equal chance to grab a workunit if they're available.

Why quit SETI@home just because you can't get certain work? Do you believe in the project's stated goals? If so, it shouldn't matter what type of work you get. Clearly you're not doing this for the credits, so who cares about the credit seekers?
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Message 1456936 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 0:41:32 UTC - in response to Message 1456918.  

No you are not correct. If your computer is one of ten asking for APs,
your chances of getting APs are one in ten. If you are one in ten thousand,
your chances are one in ten thousand. If you run two machine you have doubled your chances, 2 in ten/2 in ten thousand. You have the same opportunity they have for running personally owned machines, pay huge sums of money on equipment
and electricity charges to increase your chances of downloading APs and getting
lots of absolutely worthless ( unless bragging rights means a great deal to you and if it does I feel sorry for you ) credits.

If you are only doing distributed processing for the credits and not the science/results, there are other projects that pay better.

Or you could mine bitcoins. They actually have some worth in some places.

APs are available as they are split and I think they are split off the tapes
before the MBs. You have to remember that each 'tape' has a lower yield of APs
than MBs. The APs have been split off the present set of tapes and everybody will have to wait until a new set of tapes are loaded into the splitters.

I have no idea how to 'doctor a Bonic' but you have the exact same ability
to set your Boinc computing preferences as they do.

So, how much money are you willing to spend for a bigger piece of pie?
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Message 1456997 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 6:32:52 UTC - in response to Message 1456932.  

you are correct in saying why worry about not getting certain wu, I also understand the issue of some people putting more than one pc together to increase their credits and wu's. But i spend the same amount on my PC and the same on electricity and to not be working at 100% effeciency then its time to think about walking away. To only be using my cpu to do wu and not using gpu at all because their is not ap's wu available, also my daily creits have dropped from 1990 per day to 850 per day hence a large drop and making the whole effort of seti an issue of continuing ineffently or not.
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Message 1457052 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 8:39:56 UTC - in response to Message 1456997.  

You are aware that v7 MBs are available to crunch on GPUs?
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Message 1457140 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 14:24:57 UTC - in response to Message 1457052.  

You are aware that v7 MBs are available to crunch on GPUs?
no as I would have thought that as I had been getting AP wu and that my setting are to gpu all the time that seti would have sent v7 for GPU, So how does anyone get v7 MB to work on GPU if we dont know. But this only shifts AP's away from people like me who dont have mutliple PC but do outlay expense for PC and electricity etc the same,

For your information, astropulse wu are not created from the tapes
all the time and then at a ratio of something like 1 AP to every 25+
MB. And since AP 'pay' a bit better than MB you have to compete
against all the people that crunch AP only for the maximum credits
they can possibly accrue. And they tend to run multiple machines to do it.

You can set your preferences to AP only to try and get more AP when you
get enough of the MB wus to suit you. If your not trying to get the max
credit that you possibly can, the best all around preference setting, IMO,
would be to check mark AP then check mark "If no work for selected
applications is available, accept work from other applications?".
That way it will download AP first if there are any to download at that moment, then download MB if not.


here you state that I can request on AP wu only since AP 'pay' a bit better than MB, So how do i request to do only AP, instead of wu and get a higher credit count
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Message 1457196 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 20:01:43 UTC - in response to Message 1457140.  

So if I understand you correctly, you are concerned about credits. You want to crunch AP exclusively because it pays more, and you feel that because you pay an electric bill to run your computer that somehow you should have a higher RAC because of it?
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Message 1457244 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 23:31:59 UTC - in response to Message 1457196.  

Well why wouldnt I want to have my effort to be clearly effecient. When I was doing 1900 credit per day ave with AP's and wu. Now its next to impossible with Ap's being non existant, and they have been drying up for quite awhile.
Then Bill states that you can set your pc to only do AP's and a quick check of others using seti users and I find that this is so. But later Bill wrote that some have invested money in their PC and money for electricity and therefore should receive more better "paying" AP's and rounds it off with "So, how much money are you willing to spend for a bigger piece of pie?" which suggests that there investment is different to mine and yet i invest in a PC which has been running 24/7 now for 8 years and i have invested in electricity cost to crunch seti data since 2000 but this appears not the same.
So before Bill or volunteer tester begin ridiculing me, yes I was doing 1900 credit per day and now its 850 per day and it doesnt take a rocket sciencist to work out that I am doing the same amount of work for 50% of the reward. So if I can work the same and do AP's only, like some are doing then why wouldnt I, and if it lifts my daily credit then so be it. But with the rising costs of PC's and electricity esp here in Australia i need to justify this fall in seti units per day.
Basically it comes down to this, does seti need the wu's crunched. Because as I see it this drying up of AP's and the fall in the effeciency of my PC with what I can only crunch, must be justified. We all dont have company multi PC's working on seti, and therefore their investment is not theirs nor is the cost of running the PC.
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Message 1457245 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 23:32:47 UTC - in response to Message 1457140.  

Those settings can be found on the webpage Account/Preferences For This Project.
Check AP yes, uncheck V7 for no. Check use cpu and check gpu, uncheck If no work
and save your changes. Under Boinc Manager local preferences set cpu usage to
67%. That will free up a processor to assist gpu when needed and help keep
your pc from running bog slow. Set your cache to Minimum work buffer 3 days and
your Maximum additional work buffer to 0.01

Be advised, there is a maximum allowed download limit of 100 per cpu and 100 for gpu. If you happen to run out of AP work units to crunch for some reason, like the servers go down for maintenance/trouble you will go idle.

Asking for assistance in the Number Crunching forum will probably get you faster assistance. Is your pc a laptop or a desktop? If a desktop would you be willing to buy a more powerful gpu if your present power supply could support it?

Do you want a machine you can set and forget or are you willing to babysit it a bit?

Your processor is a bit weak and your gpu even more so. Don't expect large leaps in credits.
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Message 1457252 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 23:48:29 UTC - in response to Message 1457196.  

[i]
So if I understand you correctly, you are concerned about credits. You want to crunch AP exclusively because it pays more, and you feel that because you pay an electric bill to run your computer that somehow you should have a higher RAC because of it?[i]


It wasnt when i started looking into why my RAC had dropped off but now I know from Bill and volunteer tester why, it has changed to yes I do want to run higher RAC wu. Because there is little satisfaction in low RAC when you see for the same effort higher RAC.
Seti puts out donation required requests constantly and I understand that, but the question is do I need to sponsor something that is biased when others can have the higher RAC. I am not the only one concerned with this attitude of no AP's and low RAC, and I am not the only one who is thinking of quitting Seti. So where would Seti be then is the multi PC are only doing AP's and no one is willing to do v7's, because the balance is not right and this can only end in no one doing anything.
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Message 1457257 - Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 23:58:24 UTC - in response to Message 1457244.  

"Then Bill states that you can set your pc to only do AP's and a quick check of others using seti users and I find that this is so. But later Bill wrote that some have invested money in their PC and money for electricity and therefore should receive more better "paying" AP's and rounds it off with "So, how much money are you willing to spend for a bigger piece of pie?"

Not exactly what I said. You missed the point that 2 machines have twice the chance of down loading work units and the fact that a more powerful (read expensive) pc will complete workk uits faster and ask for them more often and therefore get them more often than your pc.

"which suggests that there investment is different to mine and yet i invest in a PC which has been running 24/7 now for 8 years and i have invested in electricity cost to crunch seti data since 2000 but this appears not the same."

Correct, it is not the same. Some PCs are more powerful than others. They use more electricity than others. Why would you think otherwise?

And if I was going to ridicule you, I wouldn't have replied to your post in the first place. Pointing out where you are mistaken in your assumptions is not ridiculing you. If you think it is perhaps I should stop now.
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Message 1457260 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 0:15:31 UTC

I have never crunched AP and never will, it isn't about the highest numbers, done in the quickest time, for me it has always been about the science.

Yes I have spent a few pound and yes I currently have 7 rigs crunching MB and yes my RAC is currently 40K+ which of course your single machine cannot match, does that make me "different" than you.

None of my rigs are "mega crunchers" yet there are people here who have thousands of dollars/pounds to spend on building bigger faster PC's so they will be able to crunch more and faster than you, is that wrong?

What you are saying is that APs should be shared out equally across all users who want them in turn, rather than first come first served?
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Message 1457288 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 4:54:46 UTC - in response to Message 1457252.  
Last modified: 25 Dec 2013, 4:55:41 UTC

It wasnt when i started looking into why my RAC had dropped off but now I know from Bill and volunteer tester why, it has changed to yes I do want to run higher RAC wu. Because there is little satisfaction in low RAC when you see for the same effort higher RAC.


Why is there little satisfaction in a small RAC? The goal is to find a signal from an intelligent civilization. The way I see it, there's just as much of a chance your smaller RAC will find the signal than there is for the #1 RAC machine.

Seti puts out donation required requests constantly and I understand that, but the question is do I need to sponsor something that is biased when others can have the higher RAC.


I'm not sure I understand. How is the project biased? And what does other people's RACs have to do with your contribution?

I am not the only one concerned with this attitude of no AP's and low RAC, and I am not the only one who is thinking of quitting Seti. So where would Seti be then is the multi PC are only doing AP's and no one is willing to do v7's, because the balance is not right and this can only end in no one doing anything.


You may not be the only one, but a lot of people doing something wrong doesn't make it right. People want to quit because they can't have a high RAC? What are they here for: the credits or the goal? I like credits just as much as the next person, but leaving because your RAC has gone down is a bit like throwing a temper tantrum over nothing. All of our RAC has gone down. Even those with the highest RAC have complained over in the Number Crunching forum about the RAC going down. They're in the same boat you are. The reduction has affected everyone equally.

What are we here for? Finding ETI or collecting credits?

[Edit] P.S., I'm not here to ridicule you. I'm here in hopes to set your priorities straight.
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Message 1457322 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 8:33:26 UTC - in response to Message 1457252.  
Last modified: 25 Dec 2013, 9:06:44 UTC


I think your GPU (ATI Radeon HD 4350/4550 (R710)) is not capable to run SETI@home v7 tasks (I think it have 'Max work group size: 128' and 256 is needed)

But (as already explained) it's easy to fill your computer with 100 GPU OpenCL AstroPulse tasks with just right Preferences.
AstroPulse tasks are available 1-2 days per ~week, 100 GPU OpenCL AstroPulse tasks are enough for my GPU to have work for 5-7 days.
(I do AstroPulse only on GPU (AMD ATI Radeon HD 6570), on CPU - only SETI@home v7
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4832843
)

Notes:
All users that know how to do it invested time to learn how to do it.
This is not cheat.
This have nothing to do with "multi PC" users (work of one PC do not affect in any way the other PCs of the same user, e.g. no more or less tasks sent to 1 PC just because it belongs to a "multi PC" user)
Low Credit of SETI@home v7 tasks is because of bad implementation of 'CreditNew'


My Settings:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=project

SETI@home Enhanced: no
SETI@home v7: no
AstroPulse v6: yes
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? yes


http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=global

Maintain enough tasks to keep busy for at least 7 days
... and up to an additional 0.01 days


Note also:
At the moment many stock ('normal') users may be hit by this problem:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=73586

I am not affected because any of these:
- I run older BOINC
- I run optimized applications (= not-stock) using app_info.xml with <plan_class>ati_opencl_100</plan_class>

Read the last post by Claggy:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=73525&postid=1456134#1456134


 


- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 
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Message 1457361 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 12:20:27 UTC - in response to Message 1457322.  

thanks for your help BilBg it think the solution is to stop using 7.2.33(64) and use 6.10.58 and not upgrade as new upgrades come along. Your setting are different to mine on 7.2.33(64) and do not have anywhere where I can cancel v7 wu and only use AP wu instead. This may solve low RAC. This will set my proity is the correct direction instead of the last 6 months of hit and miss AP and low RAC
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Message 1457366 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 12:39:19 UTC - in response to Message 1457361.  

well thats a waste of time it seems 7.2.33(64)is the only download Bonic will allow and 6.10.58 just reverts to 7.2.33(64) So im am back to where i started from does any one know how i can turn off v7 wu and only accept ap's
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Message 1457433 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 17:57:52 UTC - in response to Message 1457366.  

The settings BilBg is talking about are in your online preferences and has nothing to do with your version of BOINC on your local machine.
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Message 1457465 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 20:44:41 UTC - in response to Message 1457244.  

Well why wouldnt I want to have my effort to be clearly effecient. When I was doing 1900 credit per day ave with AP's and wu. Now its next to impossible with Ap's being non existant, and they have been drying up for quite awhile.


So you equate maximum RAC with optimum efficiency? So then you're going to only crunch AstroPulse workunits... what if ETI is found via SETI@home Multibeam v7 and you choose AP because it paid more? Will you then complain that you didn't find ETI because SETI chose to pay more for AP?
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Message 1457509 - Posted: 25 Dec 2013, 23:19:50 UTC - in response to Message 1457465.  

If ETI are found on v7 wu's then great. Seti has been around now for a long time and to be honest i wouldnt even know if seti has found anything. I am cynical enough to beleive that if seti does find anything then that string would be given to seti elite and also the glory, and good on them.
All I feel I am doing is cleaning up the other dead end space, I think the issue at the core here is that i can not beleive since 2000 crunching away 24/7 5 pc units dead that i have inches only to 1.6 mill credits and I see people with similar/if not the same pc power to me, and in less time with greater credits than I, which has caused me to try and find out why my PC is performing so poorly and so slowly. Now I know, its not my PC but what I select to crunch. Which is a great relief to me as I do not need to go and purchase another PC of greater power to crunch as it is all done to the selecting of "higher paying" wu.
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Questions and Answers : Preferences : Astropulse not using GPU anymore


 
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