Microsoft Windows 10 updates - getting it right at last

Message boards : Number crunching : Microsoft Windows 10 updates - getting it right at last
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Richard Haselgrove Project Donor
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Message 1914455 - Posted: 21 Jan 2018, 18:15:03 UTC
Last modified: 21 Jan 2018, 18:28:20 UTC

I've been doing some quiet testing in the background, trying to simulate the experience of the non-technical user who gets a commodity computer for other purposes and decides to give SETI a go.

I stripped out the hard disks from my newest machine, popped into town yesterday morning, and bought a brand-new SSD. Plugged it in, fired up the OEM Win 10 Pro DVD that can with the machine, and sat back to see what would happen.

Took a while to work out the right recovery option for 'complete reinstall', but got there in the end. Slow, but completely hands-off - no questions or choices except language. That'll be the OEM's doing. First run from internal drive you'll be familiar with. Snag here - no network driver on DVD, so no internet, so no updates. Retrieved spare USB stick from behind the sofa, and off we go - modern sneakernet.

Machine has a decent i5 (6th. gen, with HD 530 - it's actually the one we used to get the final validation bugs out of the intel_gpu app two years ago), and also a 1050 Ti - motherboard dictates that only one can be used at a time. 'First light' showed no GPUs at all, but CPU apps ran fine.

It then took the best part of 24 hours to get through all the updates (on a 50 Mbit unmetered line) - ugh. But when the music stopped, the Microsoft driver allowed me to run CUDA - I think that's a first, although no OpenCL yet.

Then I took out the 1050Ti, and got an Intel driver from MS, with OpenCL - and that worked for our apps, too. Finally, I popped the NVidia card back in, and now it detected the card as OpenCL capable as well. So, as the title says, I think thy're getting it right at last.

Host is 8444513, if anyone wants to check it out.

Edit - my 'new' SSD has a windows.old folder containing nearly 35 GB in over 550,000 files. So that's what it was doing all last night!
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Message 1914503 - Posted: 22 Jan 2018, 1:16:02 UTC

My Windows 10 PC Home edition is constantly updated from MS. All BOINC projects run fine on its 22 GB RAM except SETI@home. When running GPU tasks it reboots constantly and its reliability index drops. It has a 1050 GTX Ti board with nVidia drivers constantly updated by me. The same SETI GPU tasks run perfectly on my Linux box with GTX 750 Ti. But they use Cuda60 instead of OpenCL, using only partly the GPU. Einstein@home GPU tasks run perfectly on both PCs.
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Message boards : Number crunching : Microsoft Windows 10 updates - getting it right at last


 
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