The Highest Ranked SETI AMD Host is a MAC: Time for a STOCK MAC APP?

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TBar
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Message 1458250 - Posted: 28 Dec 2013, 17:37:36 UTC
Last modified: 28 Dec 2013, 18:27:43 UTC

SETI really needs a Stock Mac AMD App.
Top hosts: 33 - TBar: 54,841.38 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5462 @ 2.80GHz [2] AMD ATI Radeon Barts XT Prototype (1024MB) OpenCL: 1.02 Darwin 13.0.0

Let's add one to the List; Top GPU models - Mac
1. (1.000) AMD Radeon HD 6790/6850/6870 series (Barts)
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Message 1458274 - Posted: 28 Dec 2013, 19:56:41 UTC - in response to Message 1458250.  

If only... All that lost potential of those macs out there in the wild....
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Message 1458280 - Posted: 28 Dec 2013, 20:26:01 UTC - in response to Message 1458274.  

Yes, with Mountain Lion & Mavericks supporting a large number of PC video cards, it's a whole new game for the MacPro. Every MacPro since 2008 can run two 150 watt PC video cards, and pump a large amount of air over them without modification. Mine is similar to the picture only one of the upper drives is a SSD. I have removed the 2 rear drives in the video compartment to create a cathedral ceiling effect. If you desire, you can tap into the power supplies for the removed HDDs and easily route them to the video cards. Macs Fan Control will allow you to manually crank up the video compartment fan.

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Message 1458360 - Posted: 29 Dec 2013, 2:01:58 UTC - in response to Message 1458280.  

Makes me miss my old tower sniff..lol...Was force to move to a laptop for work but would be nice to have a Stock MAC app so I could get one of the new MacPros and see what it could do..One can dream...
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Message 1458370 - Posted: 29 Dec 2013, 2:45:32 UTC

I looked at systems doing testing of that OpenCL app version at SETI Beta. Many are doing quite well, with only occasional problems, hosts 46594, 61112, 51962, 22379, 69398, 59936, 47960, 61526, 47801, 54438, 61018, 54493, 68916, 58650, 42332, and 47597.

But there are some with serious problems with the app, hosts 65282, 58273, 36566, 63399, and 63599.

At least a couple of those with serious problems are older AMD/ATI cards for which the application may not be suitable, some adjustment of the project settings controlling which hosts should get the app version could be indicated.

There's probably enough data to consider releasing that app here early next year, assuming Eric has time to look at it.
                                                                  Joe
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Message 1458382 - Posted: 29 Dec 2013, 3:18:21 UTC - in response to Message 1458370.  

I looked at systems doing testing of that OpenCL app version at SETI Beta. Many are doing quite well, with only occasional problems, hosts 46594, 61112, 51962, 22379, 69398, 59936, 47960, 61526, 47801, 54438, 61018, 54493, 68916, 58650, 42332, and 47597.

But there are some with serious problems with the app, hosts 65282, 58273, 36566, 63399, and 63599.

At least a couple of those with serious problems are older AMD/ATI cards for which the application may not be suitable, some adjustment of the project settings controlling which hosts should get the app version could be indicated.

There's probably enough data to consider releasing that app here early next year, assuming Eric has time to look at it.
                                                                  Joe

Thanks Joe. From glancing over the problem hosts, I see two with Snow Leopard, and three with series 4 cards. Snow Leopard is a non-starter, I think the App calls for Lion. In Lion, my 7750 wasn't recognized, and I had problems with the pre-flashed 6850. Since anyone with Snow Leopard or above can Freely update to Mavericks, I'd set the OS limit to Mountain Lion or above. As for the cards, I'd lean toward series 5 and above. I haven't looked at the other hosts...
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Message 1459235 - Posted: 31 Dec 2013, 19:43:27 UTC

I'm glad to see there is some testing for the macs going on. It would be nice to have a stock Mac App. If that happen then they could try to get it on the App store from apple to utilize all those home iMacs out there. They are sticking with the Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs for the new MacPro but Nvidia for the iMacs and MacBook Pro (top of the line). The rest of the laptops have gone to an integrated cpu/gpu configure, trying to extend battery life it seems Speaking of which, I would think running seti on a mobile device like a phone or tablet would dramatically drain the battery on these devices, wouldn't it? I ask this since I see all sort of apps for them on here and wonder how much they would really be used. I mean no offense to anyone. Having experience dramatically less battery life on my phone and tablet, I find the culprit and removed them immediately to extend that devices battery. Nothing worse than some program looking for a wifi so it can self report, meanwhile it's draining the battery and heating up the device at the same time. Well, it would be nice to see that Seti screensaver on my Mac again since I can't get the flying toasters anymore, lol..Ok, enough pondering..back to work.
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Message 1459268 - Posted: 31 Dec 2013, 20:43:19 UTC - in response to Message 1459235.  
Last modified: 31 Dec 2013, 21:13:25 UTC

When I bought my machine Apple was advertising it could run 4 video cards as long as they didn't exceed 300 watts combined. Now imagine every MacPro since 2008 running Four 7750s which would be about the same as my two 6800s. Three of the 7750s would have to be the single slot version, but, it should work. That would be a lot of Macs with an RAC of around 55k....if you could keep them fed.
7750s are cheap :-)
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Message 1464649 - Posted: 15 Jan 2014, 17:19:37 UTC

Still the Top AMD Host;
Top hosts
ID: 6796479  29  TBar  54,401.82  7.0.65  GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5462 @ 2.80GHz (4 processors) 	[2] AMD ATI Radeon Barts XT Prototype (1024MB) OpenCL: 1.02 	Darwin 13.0.0

Still not mentioned, Top GPU models
Just thought I'd post before the Zombie Attack arrives...
:-)
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Message 1464852 - Posted: 16 Jan 2014, 2:54:45 UTC - in response to Message 1464649.  

Still the Top AMD Host;
Top hosts
ID: 6796479  29  TBar  54,401.82  7.0.65  GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5462 @ 2.80GHz (4 processors) 	[2] AMD ATI Radeon Barts XT Prototype (1024MB) OpenCL: 1.02 	Darwin 13.0.0

Still not mentioned, Top GPU models
Just thought I'd post before the Zombie Attack arrives...
:-)


The top GPU list only shows those GPU's that are running the stock apps, all of running anonymous are not considered.

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Message 1465971 - Posted: 18 Jan 2014, 22:27:17 UTC - in response to Message 1464649.  

How many AP's are you running at a time on each GPU?

Thanks,

Chris
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Message 1466020 - Posted: 19 Jan 2014, 2:38:50 UTC - in response to Message 1465971.  

Hey, that's a nice new Mac you have there. I'm running one per card, which is about all you want to be running with a single quad core CPU and two GPUs. That leaves two cores for CPU APs. Normal unblanked GPU APs will run the total CPU usage at around 60-65%. When both GPUs run into heavily Blanked APs the CPU usage will run up to around 90% with the two CPU tasks also running. AstroPulse GPU tasks have settings available that can be used to increase the GPU usage without having to increase the number of tasks per GPU. Multibeam GPU tasks do not have similar settings and have to resort to running multiple tasks to increase GPU usage. As long as your GPU is running near 90-95%, running more tasks will only double your completion times and lessen the number of CPU tasks you can run.

The best way to find the settings you need to use is to boot into windows and use the tools available there to find the highest settings needed. Generally, for the newer cards, the number of compute units the card has is a loose guideline. I'm using the command line setting in the app_info file since the original app_info isn't setup for a separate cmdline file. You would place the settings between the tags as;
<app_version>
<app_name>astropulse_v6</app_name>
<version_num>607</version_num>
<plan_class>opencl_ati_100</plan_class>
<avg_ncpus>0.06</avg_ncpus>
<max_ncpus>0.20</max_ncpus>
<cmdline>-unroll 12 -ffa_block 8192 -ffa_block_fetch 4096 -sbs 256 -hp</cmdline>
<coproc>
<type>ATI</type>
<count>1</count>
</coproc>

Since your cards have 20 compute units, you might want to increase the setting a little. You would need to use one of the tools capable of displaying GPU usage to know just how much to increase it. You would probably be safe with using an -unroll number of around 14 or 16 otherwise. As far as I can tell, the -hp (high priority) setting doesn't work in OSX. You could just leave that out and use a setting of;
<cmdline>-unroll 14 -ffa_block 8192 -ffa_block_fetch 4096 -sbs 256</cmdline>

Nice to see such a capable Mac at SETI, let's see what it will do ;-)
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Message 1466087 - Posted: 19 Jan 2014, 5:34:46 UTC - in response to Message 1466020.  

Cool, thanks for the info. That is actually my friends Mac Pro that I tried out seti on to make sure it would fully utilize both GPU's before I dropped my own money on one. Lol

That said it ran great, so I'll probably pick one up with duel D700’s instead of the stock D300’s. Those should be close to twice as fast as the D300’s from what I can tell. That said, it will probably be a couple of months before I get my hands on one of those for myself...:)

Thanks,

Chris
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Message 1466484 - Posted: 20 Jan 2014, 1:53:09 UTC - in response to Message 1466087.  

Chris,

What program were you using on that Mac Pro? Was it the standard Seit program or was it Lunatics or crunchers anonymous? I've had an old MacBook Pro but seti doesn't utilize it's Nvidia card and I plan on upgrading to a new one but was disappointed that Seit won't utilize the graph card. I wondered about those MacPros, but like you didn't want to throw down that huge amount if those cards weren't going to be used. I guess my other question goes out to Tbar. I remember seeing a while back the debate over flash storage or having external hard drive. I think they were arguing about the constant reading and rewriting wearing out the flash. So would it be better to have an external hard drive to install seti on and use that for the read/rewrites? Thanks in advance for any advice.
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Message 1466489 - Posted: 20 Jan 2014, 2:31:39 UTC - in response to Message 1466484.  

The only available Mac GPU App is located here; http://lunatics.kwsn.net/index.php?module=Downloads;catd=35

There are nVidia Apps still in progress. I haven't read anything about it in a while, and just found some recent activity here, http://www.arkayn.us/forum/index.php?board=7.0. You might have to register to see that, I'm not sure, http://www.arkayn.us/forum/index.php

As far as I know, unless you are going to work some terminal commands, the SETI data files are installed in the Application Support folder. If I had a Laptop, I would look into using an external drive.

Looks like I have some reading to catch up on.
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Message 1472003 - Posted: 2 Feb 2014, 17:55:09 UTC - in response to Message 1466489.  
Last modified: 2 Feb 2014, 17:55:36 UTC

Since this last post, I have moved both Data folders to a normal HDD from the SSD. You can find the instructions here; Moving BOINC Manager or BOINC Data Folder to a Different Drive

In my case, I created a folder on a partition named Mov1, then separated the data by OS. The commands used were;
[1] Quit BOINC
Copy the BOINC Data directory from the "/Library/Application Support/" directory to the desired drive. Rename the original BOINC Data directory or move it to a different directory on your boot drive as a backup safety measure. In any case, you must now not have a "/Library/Application Support/BOINC Data" directory before the next step.
[3] Create a symbolic link to the new BOINC Data directory in place of the old one. Enter the following in the Terminal application:
sudo ln -fhs "/Volumes/Mov1/BOINC/Maverick/BOINC Data" "/Library/Application Support/BOINC Data"
Substituting your new path for {newDataPath}; for example: "/Volumes/newDrive/myData".
[5] IMPORTANT: you must create symbolic links. Macintosh aliases created with the Finder will not work!
Run the script Mac_SA_Secure.sh to set up proper permissions at the new locations. Enter the following in the Terminal application:
cd /Volumes/Mov1/BOINC/Maverick/BOINC\ Data
sudo sh /Volumes/Mov1/BOINC/Maverick/Mac_SA_Secure.sh
where {newDataPath} is as above and {path} is the path to the Mac_SA_Secure.sh script. (As before, you can drag the Mac_SA_Secure.sh file from a Finder window onto the Terminal window instead of typing its path.)
[6] Relaunch BOINC.

If you edit the app_info.xml, you can correct the permissions by running the following commands instead of reinstalling BOINC;
When in Seti project directory (.../BOINC Data/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu)
sudo chown boinc_master *
sudo chgrp boinc_project *

Seems to work as well as before...
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Message 1472586 - Posted: 4 Feb 2014, 4:35:30 UTC - in response to Message 1472003.  

Good to know, I'm about to have to do this myself on one of my machines.

Chris
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Message 1475402 - Posted: 10 Feb 2014, 22:23:27 UTC - in response to Message 1472586.  

TBar, how are you getting such low CPU time's on your ATI work units? Is there some setting I'm unaware of? Regardless of OS my Astropulse WU using v1874 uses an order of magnitude more CPU time than yours? I know there is a new build for Windows that uses almost no CPU power but blanked work units but we don't have that on the Mac yet so I'm curious if there is something special you are doing.

Thanks,

Chris
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Message 1475420 - Posted: 10 Feb 2014, 23:27:15 UTC - in response to Message 1475402.  

TBar, how are you getting such low CPU time's on your ATI work units? Is there some setting I'm unaware of?

Yes, the settings I mentioned in this post, 1466020. If you add the settings appropriate to you card, the GPU Load will increase and the CPU Load will decrease. If I remove those settings the CPU usage goes way up. Looking at this host, 7159696, it appears you aren't using any cmdline settings. For that GPU you should be able to use;
-unroll 6 -ffa_block 6144 -ffa_block_fetch 1536 -sbs 256

I created an app_info entry that uses a cmdline file instead of the app_info cmdline options. That way you don't have to edit the app_info settings to change the cmdline options. You also lose the nagging "Not using ap_cmdline.txt-file, using commandline options." from the Stderr. You have to create a text file with the same name as the entry in the app_info, I named it 'ap_cmdline_OpenCL_ATI.txt'. The new app_info.xml is;

<app_info>
<app>
<name>astropulse_v6</name>
</app>
<file_info>
<name>ap_6.07r1874_sse3_clATI_OSX64</name>
<executable/>
</file_info>
<file_info>
<name>ap_cmdline_OpenCL_ATI.txt</name>
</file_info>

<app_version>
<app_name>astropulse_v6</app_name>
<version_num>607</version_num>
<plan_class>opencl_ati_100</plan_class>
<avg_ncpus>0.06</avg_ncpus>
<max_ncpus>1</max_ncpus>
<coproc>
<type>ATI</type>
<count>1</count>
</coproc>
<file_ref>
<file_name>ap_6.07r1874_sse3_clATI_OSX64</file_name>
<main_program/>
</file_ref>
<file_ref>
<file_name>ap_cmdline_OpenCL_ATI.txt</file_name>
<open_name>ap_cmdline.txt</open_name>
</file_ref>

</app_version>
<app>
<name>astropulse_v6</name>
</app>
<file_info>
<name>ap_6.02r561_OSX64</name>
<executable/>
</file_info>
<app_version>
<app_name>astropulse_v6</app_name>
<version_num>602</version_num>
<file_ref>
<file_name>ap_6.02r561_OSX64</file_name>
<main_program/>
</file_ref>
</app_version>
<app>
<name>setiathome_v7</name>
</app>
<file_info>
<name>setiathome_7.00_i686-apple-darwin</name>
<executable/>
</file_info>
<app_version>
<app_name>setiathome_v7</app_name>
<version_num>700</version_num>
<file_ref>
<file_name>setiathome_7.00_i686-apple-darwin</file_name>
<main_program/>
</file_ref>
</app_version>
</app_info>

Seems to work...
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Message 1475457 - Posted: 11 Feb 2014, 0:54:06 UTC - in response to Message 1475420.  

Awesome, I'll give that a try.

Thanks,

Chris
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Message boards : Number crunching : The Highest Ranked SETI AMD Host is a MAC: Time for a STOCK MAC APP?


 
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