NVIDIA 190.38 (WHQL] & CUDA 2.3 ^^

24/07/2009 20:57:54 CUDA device: GeForce 8400 GS (driver version 19038, compute capability 1.1, 256MB, est. 8GFLOPS)

update :)

BYE 185.85 version CUDA 2.2

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SETI@Home Informational message -9 result_overflow
with a general handicap of 80% and it makes much d' efforts for the community and s' expimer, thank you d' to be understanding.

.... The issue is the GPUgrid app doesn't seem to behave with later drivers....

So some people seem to be saying, but it doesn't seem to be true for me - just completed task 1010279 on a second machine. The current GPUGrid thread on the subject seems to be covering some genuine issues with Linux drivers, but the Win 32 allegations just seem to be re-hashes of old archaeology without evidence. We had something similar at Lunatics, with people blaming applications, drivers, anything but their own hardware - which was where the problem turned out to be.

If people want to play safe and not update CUDA drivers while a long GPUGrid task is in progress, that would make sense: but not to upgrade at all because of this rumour would be shortsighted.

It appears their app will work with 190.38 without issue, well it has so far. Also they have announced they will be releasing a cuda 2.2 app next week.

As for upgrading to 190.38, have managed to get 3 machines done so far. Just waiting on the others to finish off their cuda work. Highly recommended if you can do it.

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BOINC blog

As for upgrading to 190.38, have managed to get 3 machines done so far. Just waiting on the others to finish off their cuda work. Highly recommended if you can do it.

Yes, upgrading nVidia drivers while you have CUDA work in your cache can cause problems.

I have Windows XP with BOINC running as a service, so I opened the 'Services' administration tool (services.msc), stopped the service, and set the startup type to Disabled. Then I was able to upgrade the drivers safely: check that everything was running smoothly in the nVidia control panel, copy the runtime DLLs, and restart BOINC in an orderly fashion. Worked for me.

As for upgrading to 190.38, have managed to get 3 machines done so far. Just waiting on the others to finish off their cuda work. Highly recommended if you can do it.

Yes, upgrading nVidia drivers while you have CUDA work in your cache can cause problems.

I have Windows XP with BOINC running as a service, so I opened the 'Services' administration tool (services.msc), stopped the service, and set the startup type to Disabled. Then I was able to upgrade the drivers safely: check that everything was running smoothly in the nVidia control panel, copy the runtime DLLs, and restart BOINC in an orderly fashion. Worked for me.

@Richard - could you elaborate a little, please. Would these problems only occur if running as a Service (and what kind of problems)?
Reason for request - as I am running Vista x64, I can't run as a Service. But since I upgraded I seem to be seeing more compute errors whether running Raistmer's V12 noVLARkill or stock CUDA. The errors are still very few compared to the number of WU's being crunched (about half a dozen overnight while running stock CUDA) but are annoyingly persistent.

The errors from the V12 App are the well documented:

Work Unit Info:
...............
WU true angle range is :  0.434701
After app init: total GPU memory 939524096	 free GPU memory 868741120
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'd:/BoincSeti_Prog/sinbad_repositories/LunaticsUnited/SETI_CUDA_MB_exp/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 920 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'd:/BoincSeti_Prog/sinbad_repositories/LunaticsUnited/SETI_CUDA_MB_exp/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 925 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'd:/BoincSeti_Prog/sinbad_repositories/LunaticsUnited/SETI_CUDA_MB_exp/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 925 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'cudaMemcpy(&flags, dev_find_pulse_flag, sizeof(*dev_find_pulse_flag), cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost)' in file 'd:/BoincSeti_Prog/sinbad_repositories/LunaticsUnited/SETI_CUDA_MB_exp/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 1733 : unknown error.

The errors when running stock CUDA are the equally-well reported:

Work Unit Info:
...............
WU true angle range is :  0.415156
Optimal function choices:
-----------------------------------------------------
name                
-----------------------------------------------------
              v_BaseLineSmooth (no other)
            v_GetPowerSpectrum 0.00018 0.00000 
                   v_ChirpData 0.01270 0.00000 
                  v_Transpose4 0.00438 0.00000 
               FPU opt folding 0.00312 0.00000 
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 622 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 627 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 627 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 632 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'find_pulse_kernel' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 632 : unknown error.
Cuda error 'cudaMemcpy(&flags, dev_find_pulse_flag, sizeof(*dev_find_pulse_flag), cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost)' in file 'c:/sw/gpgpu/seti/seti_boinc/client/cuda/cudaAcc_pulsefind.cu' in line 1318 : unknown error.

F.

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As for upgrading to 190.38, have managed to get 3 machines done so far. Just waiting on the others to finish off their cuda work. Highly recommended if you can do it.

Yes, upgrading nVidia drivers while you have CUDA work in your cache can cause problems.

I have Windows XP with BOINC running as a service, so I opened the 'Services' administration tool (services.msc), stopped the service, and set the startup type to Disabled. Then I was able to upgrade the drivers safely: check that everything was running smoothly in the nVidia control panel, copy the runtime DLLs, and restart BOINC in an orderly fashion. Worked for me.

@Richard - could you elaborate a little, please. Would these problems only occur if running as a Service (and what kind of problems)?

Surely. Recent BOINC clients delete every CUDA task in the cache if they don't detect any CUDA cards at startup (another of Raistmer's "be careful what you wish for" bug reports - you may remember my "big bug in v6.6.34" thread on boinc_alpha).

I think this can happen if BOINC starts up before the driver installation is complete. With the WinXP service mode, that's easy to avoid by setting the service to disabled for the driver-install restart. Vista has a 'delayed start' for services, which may be enough - except you'd never find out, because the CUDA question wouldn't arise. I'm not sure how you prevent a non-service mode BOINC v6 from running at startup, but you would be wise to do so: my only experience is v5 where you took the shortcut out of the 'Startup' program group, but nowadays I think it's GUI or registry.

I'm not sure how you prevent a non-service mode BOINC v6 from running at startup, but you would be wise to do so: my only experience is v5 where you took the shortcut out of the 'Startup' program group, but nowadays I think it's GUI or registry.

I have not found a way to get the process to auto-start on Vista anyway. Since it is a non-registered Process it asks for permission to start every time the machine is re-booted. Pain in the b*tt but it does circumvent the problem under discussion here.

F.

PS If anyone else can shed any light on the other bits that I posted, then I would be eternally grateful. One thing that I omitted to mention in my previous post is that occasionally (just occasionally - not every time the errors are encountered by any means) the box starts erroring out ALL following CUDA WU's with "-9's" and required a re-boot of the box to stop this behaviour.

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I've started a new thread with updated instructions here.

Mods, can we lock this thread please. Discussions can continue in the new one.

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BOINC blog