Exotic Hardware
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Number crunching :
Exotic Hardware
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 Juergen Liebermann Send message Joined: 20 Mar 14 Posts: 2 Credit: 4,140,185 RAC: 25 
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Dear All, I am a long time participant on many different kind of PCs but recently I have discovered my interest in playing around with a little bit more 'exotic' hardware. Out of curiosity and just for fun I have bought a MINIX NEO X7 box today (http://www.minix.com.hk/Products/MINIX-NEOX7.html). I have installed NativeBoinc for Android and this tiny box is crunching already (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7305528). Unfortunately I do not see that the relativitly strong GPU is being utilized for crunching. Are there any other ways to use this box more efficiently? How can I make use of the GPU? Would it be worth to run this box with any kind of LINUX? Many thanks in advance for your suggestions :-) ID: 1525389 ·  |
tbret  Send message Joined: 28 May 99 Posts: 3380 Credit: 296,162,071 RAC: 40 
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How much of the RAM is reserved for the GPU? That may be a problem. EDIT: I'm an idiot. The problem is that BOINC only recognizes GPUs for-which there is a program. In other words, I don't know of a program that will run on that GPU. ID: 1525412 · |
HAL9000  Send message Joined: 11 Sep 99 Posts: 6534 Credit: 196,805,888 RAC: 57
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Crunching on ARM hardware is still rather young. It progresses as fast at people have time to work on it. Also the GPU's in the ARM hardware are not very powerful. I'm not to say they couldn't be useful. They are just not the powerhouses you might expect. The GPU in your box looks to be around 20 GFLOP according to the specs. Which is about half of the old 8500GT I am currently using. So if someone was up to writing the application, & having BOINC see the GPU, then it could crank out some work. SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours  Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[
ID: 1525419 · |
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Josef W. Segur Send message Joined: 30 Oct 99 Posts: 4504 Credit: 1,414,761 RAC: 0
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I did see but cannot locate a notice that somebody at a BOINC project has coded FFT transforms for the MALI GPUs. That's a start, but a more general language like OpenCL or CUDA would be more help in using those GPUs effectively. Joe ID: 1525451 · |
Richard Haselgrove  Send message Joined: 4 Jul 99 Posts: 14650 Credit: 200,643,578 RAC: 874 
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I did see but cannot locate a notice that somebody at a BOINC project has coded FFT transforms for the MALI GPUs. That's a start, but a more general language like OpenCL or CUDA would be more help in using those GPUs effectively.Joe There's much information and debate about issues like that in the thread Parallella, Raspberry Pi, FPGA & All That Stuff on the Einstein@Home message board. In particular, Claggy has posted a link there to Optimizing Fast Fourier Transformation on ARM Mali GPUs. ID: 1525478 · |
Raistmer  Send message Joined: 16 Jun 01 Posts: 6325 Credit: 106,370,077 RAC: 121 
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From that article (about FFT) one could conclude that that GPU supports OpenCL. This fact makes it not SO exotic hardware and eventually it can be used by SETI as a matter of SDK installation and OpenCL apps rebuild. SETI apps news We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them. ID: 1525811 · |
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Claggy Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 4654 Credit: 47,537,079 RAC: 4
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From that article (about FFT) one could conclude that that GPU supports OpenCL. It came from the OpenCLonARM twitter feed. Claggy ID: 1525820 · |
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Claggy Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 4654 Credit: 47,537,079 RAC: 4
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This fact makes it not SO exotic hardware and eventually it can be used by SETI as a matter of SDK installation and OpenCL apps rebuild. DA recently said: We're working on changing the client so that if OpenCL reports a coprocessor How about these for potential new OpenCL devices that Boinc could detect: khronos OpenCL Conformant Products ARM Limited 2014-06-13 OpenCL_1_1 Claggy ID: 1525826 · |
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Raistmer Send message Joined: 16 Jun 01 Posts: 6325 Credit: 106,370,077 RAC: 121
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Current SETI apps are OpenCL 1.0 conformant so can be used on any OpenCL 1.0 and upper device if its floating point precision is good enough. All that needed is volunteer with corresponding SDK knowledge for porting/rebulding. SETI apps news We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them. ID: 1525838 · |
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Juergen Liebermann Send message Joined: 20 Mar 14 Posts: 2 Credit: 4,140,185 RAC: 25
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Hi, Thank you all for your feedback :-) According to http://community.arm.com/message/18342#18342 I had to learn that the Mali-400 GPU does not support OpenCL. Does that mean that there will be no chance to get this GPU engaged for S@H work? Please apologize my ignorance... my background is Business IT, therefore my knowledge about technical details is quite limited ;-) Cheers, Juergen ID: 1525845 · |
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Raistmer Send message Joined: 16 Jun 01 Posts: 6325 Credit: 106,370,077 RAC: 121
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Well, then this GPU not suitable for SETI in the current state. Though there were attempts to implement FFT via non-compute shaders on the dawn of GPGPU I'm not sure it's practical to try to adapt them to this GPU. New GPU with OpenCL support will be widely available well before such porting even will start. SETI apps news We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them. ID: 1525862 · |
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