Hi everyone, I've had one of my crunchers up and running for a bit now and it seems like its RAC is lower then it should be. It has an ATI 5850 and an NVIDIA GTX 580 both doing 2 WUs at once, as well as 4 out of 8 cores crunching.

5850 is usually 90-97% utilized and is also driving the monitor. 580 wont show its utilization, but is usually at least 70C with its fan spooling up to 40-60%.

Last I had heard the stock apps for GPUs were best, so everything is stock at the moment. One thing I did notice is that its BOINC version is a bit far behind at 7.2.42. Seems I got stuck with Linux Mint 17.3 KDE as I can't upgrade to the newer versions without a fresh install and 7.2.42 is the latest BOINC version in its repos.

Host is: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7738389 if your curious.

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SoG tasks are very demanding on the CPU, particularly with older GPUs (the GT580 is considered to be an "old" GPU in this context)and AMD processors. To run at best throughput you need to have one CPU core per (Nvidia) task being run, so that means "freeing up" 4 CPU cores. This sounds a frightening process, but actually fairly simple....
If you are running the BOINC manager GUI, go to the "advanced" view, under options/computing preferences you should find a tab "computing", near the top of this tab is an option to set the percentage of CPU cores BOINC uses (now this bit sounds a bit strange) - set this to 50%. (You have an 8-core CPU, and doing this will "block" 4 of the cores to BOINC CPU tasks, leaving 4 cores for GPU tasks to play with). When you done this go back to "options" and select in turn "read local prefs" and "read config files" (I can't remember which one has to be done, but re-reading the wrong one won't have any impact).

Good luck, and carry on crunching.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Hi Bob, I actually already have it set to only use 4 cores when the GPUs are in use. I set my cc_config file to use 1 CPU per GPU WU. With this I usually see around 83-84% utilization on the CPU with some spikes up to around 90%.

Maybe I need to go up to 5 free cores and see if that helps? Its hard to be sure since the NVIDIA tools don't show me the actual GPU utilization for the 580.

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There are newer Linux OpenCL Apps at Beta that might be a little better. The ATI App probably won't be much better, but the nVidia App should be a nice speedup compared to the current App. You could go over there long enough to try out the Apps and obtain a copy. So, which drivers did you use to get two platforms working on Linux? I was told that doesn't work very well. Are they both from the repository or is one from the vendor?
Interesting.

Actually it wasn't too bad. I used the repository drivers for the ATI, then when I added the NVIDIA, I used their drivers. The only issue I ran into was after the second driver install, it wouldn't start X windows. I just had to copy the backed up xorg.conf file back to the one used.

I don't think this would work if I wanted to run a display off the 580, but its only for crunching.

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