KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[Nuadormrac]

OK, so the new laptop arrived, and I have it set to take work for nVidia, but not for CPU from Milkyway. However it downloaded tasks for CPU, and seems to be ignoring project preferences on this. Anyone noticed?

Outside of that difference, the GPU crunching does seem to go a lot faster then the CPU. Though of a somewhat unsuspected surprise, both Windows 7 and BOINC sees 8 CPU cores, not 4. It's an i7 quad core, I guess each core being dual threaded, software sees it as 2 physically seperate ones, so it pulls 8 CPU tasks to crunch at a time.... It does recognize the nVidia GPU, so it's been pulling 9 tasks to run at once... Have sorta wanted to leave the CPU for other projects though which wouldn't have the biggest difference for them based on the GPU....
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[The King's Own]

In BOINC Manager Adjust the Tools--Computing Prefernces--Other Options to 75% or 87.5 %. That will leave one or two CPU threads free. Also Ubse Windows Environment Variables set Swan Sync=0 to dedicate the GPU to a core
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What are you going to do, bleed on me?

[Concrete-mixing Moose]

CPUs with HT are seen by Boinc and non-Boinc projects like Folding@home as CPUs with double so many physical cores. Task Manager in Windows also sees double physical cores.
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Save my home - click every day on the picture!

[Nuadormrac]

Well it's not that I was looking to not have BOINC run on one of the cores so much, as I was looking to keep Milkyway on the GPU (except for the 0.05% it says it's taking of the CPU), so that the other cores would be dedicated to other projects that don't have a GPU option... But it seems that having set that in the preferences, the manager is ignoring that, and is downloading CPU tasks in addition to GPU tasks...

[Gemjunkie]

I'd double check preferences at your MW account, especially if you're using more than one profile (default, home, work, school). I've had unexpected results attaching a new computer where I've forgotten I've been crunching under the home profile for months.

Also make sure the option:

[Nuadormrac]

Yeah the accept other work was also disabled, and this computer is not running in a profile....

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/show_host_detail.php?hostid=457135
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[Gemjunkie]

I don't think it's the client, though. It shouldn't matter what it asks for, if your preferences at the project say no cpu WUs the server shouldn't send any.
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(older, before split CPID)

[Nuadormrac]

Yeah, I was shocked myself, but CPU is unticked in the preferences, so I have no idea why the client has been asking for CPU tasks... As in is the project not passing that preference up, or is 7.0.28 not acknowledging it. I do have an overide file set for things like the work cache (a lot easier then going into a project and setting all that, and having to force up update whenever one makes changes), so maybe.... But project specific preferences don't even enter into it there, so it should still acknowledge those.... There's nothing locally set in the tools/computing preferences that touches upon project specific settings...
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[Gemjunkie]

From your account page try "Edit Computing preferences" and set

On multiprocessors, use at most 0 or 1processors
On multiprocessors, use at most 0 or 5% of the processors


All I can I think of.
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(older, before split CPID)

[Nuadormrac]

I do have a preferences file which would over-ride, but the way it's classified it looks like those settings apply to all BOINC projects. It's not that I don't want BOINC to use the CPUs, I just want BOINC to run othr projects on the CPUs... AKA Milkyway seems to be more optimized for a better return on the GPU, many projects are CPU only or do work that'd be better optimized for the CPU.

At least from the look of it it, setting this wouldn't do what I would want, if it would prevent BOINC from getting CPU tasks from projects other then this one. The note at the top of that page also says it effects all projects, not what I'd want Perhaps if it would still grab GPU tasks with a 0 resource share (so the project couldn't accumulate project debt) that would prevent it from requesting CPU projects, if no other GPU project is active at the time and accepting new tasks, hmm... It depends how it treats resource share, and if it defines it for the CPU only, or not.... Though if the GPU counts towards project debt if it was low enough that the GPU crunched a higher % then necessary it might keep everything else in debt to it, not sure. I did have to bump that back as from when I was crunching it on a CPU and had the opti app for extra credits (years ago) it was set to a 500 resource share....

I guess I could try a resource share of nothing, and see if it still gets GPU tasks, hmm... Not sure that setting effects CPUs only, though or how debt would figure in when a GPU project is compared to a CPU project (they are seperate if they're running on different devices in practice, but does the code treat it that way for scheduleing, hmm)
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[Gemjunkie]

Do you use BAM? I don't.

I don't know what else to suggest. I haven't seen that problem unless I had a computer on a wrong profile or had a checkmark in the wrong place. (Except for Einstein, which sends WUs against your settings.) MW works fine for me as a GPU only project. My preferences:




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(older, before split CPID)

[Nuadormrac]

I'm beginning to suggest resource share has a lot to do with it.... Initially MW was 500 resource share, and being in a rush when I was setting it up to go grab a bite to eat, aside from MW I had only attached FreeHAL... I was surprised it started getting GPU projects with it set not to, but I was less concerned about the CPU crunching then. I got the computer at 5 pm, had a bunch of stuff to do from video drivers to Windows update, to loading my AV software, so it was after 7 and I didn't want to late longer for dinner. I took someone out for pizza...

Latter I attached another project but it was still getting CPU tasks until I stripped the resource share down to 200 (the other projects were 100).... It's stopped doing that. Only thing, I was in such a rush and slapped something on so quickly I ended up putting on the x86 client; gotta run my queue out now, to get the x64 client. Well a lot of the projects probably don't have an x64 app, but some perhaps do. Also, though it might have been corrected I seem to remember win7 having a slow memory leak wrt 32-bit programs, but specifically on the win64 version of it (the win32 version didn't have that leak)... It was over a year ago I remember reading about that one though.... I do NOT shut down every night, though as it's a laptop I do move it more then I would a desktop. Well anyhow.... MW had such a high resource share because when I last crunched it (when I didn't have a GPU), I was using the opti-app that would complete tasks in like 45 mins or so, and I think they were paying about 200 credits per task, vs the current. So it payed better to run it on the opti-app more, then other stuff. I'm guessing it ignores the selection to not use the CPU if either:

- there are no CPU tasks
- the resource share is such that it's amassed a lot of project debt, and GPU crunching only wouldn't pay it off

Still one would expect that debt on the GPU would be defined different then on the CPU, because they're different crunching devices, and for instance a CPU only project could never get GPU time to help collect on debt owed it by other projects. But perhaps they don't define it that way in their code, hmm....

Things would have to be further tested to see if that pans out. At first I was like "oh bother, 7.0.28 has some glitch); wouldn't be the first time, the bug fix list has addressed issues dealing with preferences in various builds before. 7.0.31 woulda been the next thing to try if something didn't adjust....
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[Pooh Bear 27]

I found that GPU projects can now steal CPU cores in version 7+. I am running POEM on GPU only, but my CPU project I had my CPUs set to 50%. Well, I was only running 3 CPU projects with the GPU project instead of 4 plus. I had to change preferences to set the percentage as 5 CPUs to get 4 CPUs plus the GPU to run.

Kind of bothersome, but at least I have it figured out.

[Gemjunkie]

[Gemjunkie]

[Pooh Bear 27]

[Gemjunkie]

I see, other projects mostly use the 4 cores and Poem effectively claims one hyperthread "core". In effect, if not technically accurate?



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(older, before split CPID)

[Nuadormrac]

[Gemjunkie]

Between a rock and a hard place.
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(older, before split CPID)