Comparative Performance of CUDA Cards

The question in my mind at the moment is “which Nvidia card is the best value for money for SETI?”. I have gone through the results from the CUDA work-units and pulled out the ones where the credit granted is the credit claimed (i.e. work units where both computers used GPU).
I have used my machine as a reference with its 8600GT card with 256M RAM. The potential problem is that I am running the Crunch3r CUDA client on 64-bit Linux and every other result came from Windows machines. This may account for he big difference between my GPU and the next slowest on this list which is a 8800GT...?

In this table, the speed of the GPU cards are the number of identical work units they could process in the time taken for the 8600GT to do a single work unit.

8600GT(256) Linux : 1
8800GT (512) : 21.3
9600GT (512) : 25.3
9800GTX (512) : 23.1
GTX260 (896) : 17.0
GTX285 (1024) : 24.2
GTX295 (896) : 23.2

Out of that lot, the 9600GT seems to be the first choice! I will spend a bit more time on this and post a more comprehensive list as I get more data.

Upload problem with SETI

There appears to be a problem with SETI@home uploads, at first I blamed my Unwired internet connection but quickly came to the conclusion that it was on SETI’s side. Their website forum hints at bandwidth problems resulting from Astropulse activity. Needless to say, I have dropped a few places in the rankings over the weekend.

The Unwired connection at home has not been without its share of problems in the past. When I moved into my apartment, I signed a 6 month lease and it didn’t seem like a good idea to take a 12 month DSL contract. At that stage there wasn’t much available in the GPRS/3G market that wasn’t expensive and didn’t require a 24 month commitment. I decided that based on the fact that Unwired supplied an Ethernet modem (much easier to get working on Linux as there are no drivers), I would give them a try despite reading some pretty bad reviews.
Unwired uses the 3.5GHz range and when I first tried to get a connection, there was massive interference in the area. This would disappear around 10pm and then start again at 6am … not useful when wanting to browse and check email in the evenings!
As I had paid for the modem, I didn’t want to admit defeat so I moved it around my apartment for a frustrating couple of hours until it landed in the current location (taped to the inside of the lounge window). I tried removing the fold-up antenna but that didn’t seem to make a difference although it did stop the device roaming from the side to the main antenna and back every couple of minutes. The heavy baking tray in the picture is to try and screen the "wabbit" from interference that seems to emanate from directly opposite to the Unwired tower. There is a D-link wireless router on the floor that is connected to the Unwired modem that eliminated the hassle of running Cat5 around the lounge.

Well, a couple of months down the track and I get peaks of around 90Kb/s which is adequate for what I do, although the service is still far too unstable for Skype with drop-outs every couple of minutes. I noticed that they have upped the speed on the prepaid service to 1024/256 ... thats an improvement!
I may try a 3G service at some stage as they are now cheaper but the idea of trying to get a USB modem working on Ubuntu doesn’t appeal!

Optimized SETI App and Norton AntiVirus cont.

After some time with Google, I have found a couple of references to other people having similar problems with false positives from Norton Antivirus 2009 and Norton Internet Security 2009 with the AK-v8 application. Based on my experience, it also affects the 2008 version of Norton.

Optimized SETI App and Norton AntiVirus

After installing Crunch3r's 64-bit Linux CUDA SETI client, I decided that I would look at installing the AK ver 8 optimized clients on a few of my other machines. It does make a notable difference, on the IBM X-Series, the average run-time was around 23 000 seconds and with the SSE2 optimized version, this came down to around 14 000 seconds. I have since installed the SSE3 version and expect a further improvement.

The interesting bit was with my laptop, its a Core Duo that runs 32-bit Windows XP. I checked using a program called "CPU-Z" and it supports SSE3. I downloaded the zip file and installed the appropriate files. When I download anything at the office, the proxy checks traffic using Clam antivirus, the server share it was downloaded to runs a McAfee product and my laptop runs Norton AntiVirus 2008. None of them complained about the downloaded zip file or its contents.

I restarted the Boinc client and I get a collection of windows popping up to tell me that Norton's "SONAR" has found a file infected with "Downloader" and has deleted it. It turns out that it doesn’t like the ak_v8_win_sse3.exe file and has removed it. I also get a warning that an Excel document has been downloaded to one of my network drives.
I copied the "offending" file onto three of our network shares and none of the resident antivirus programs found a problem, so I then upload it to the Kaspersky online service and once again it is clean. There is also no sign or record of the Excel document that was supposedly downloaded.
My question now is: "Does the optimized client have some malicious code in it or has Norton given a false positive?".
I have detached from SETI completely on the laptop as a precaution and to delete all traces of the download that where in the project folder but am now a little nervous about the other machines that have optimized clients installed!
Anyone else seen something similar??

SETI, CUDA and 64-bit Ubuntu

Given up waiting for SETI@Home to release their CUDA client for 64-bit Ubuntu, so downloaded Crunch3r's version. The directions in the "Readme" file are great and its a straight-forward install.
I'm impressed so far, its been running 20 minutes and its almost 20% of the way through a work-unit that would take around 9 hours if crunched on the AMD X2 4200's CPU


Ok, result is 58.73 credits in 2966 seconds!! I think that is pretty good for a second-hand 8600GT with 256Megs RAM.

First GPU Credit

My 8600GT finally yielded some credit for GPUGrid. The total processor time was just over 6 hours but wall time was around 32 hours for the workunit. I'm not sure what is causing the big discrepancy, there was no improvement when I suspended all the other CPU tasks. The credit of 3718 does make the whole thing worthwhile as that is notably more than the CPU (AMD X2 4200+) managed in the same period.

Quintillion

Looking at the "Certificate of Computation" for all projects on the GPUGrid website, I have done 1.06 quintillion floating point operations.
Google’ling and Wikipedia'ing gives a general consensus that a "quintillion" is 10 to the power 18, so I have done 1 060 000 000 000 000 000 floating point operations so far!

Still more cool overcast weather, so my "farm" is running at full steam again today! I bought a 8cm case fan for my home PC (the one with the CUDA card), so hopefully it will be happier during the next bout of hot weather.

IBM xSeries 206

Monday morning and a pleasant 21ºC here in Sydney at the moment, so everything is up and running, including my home PC that is coping fine without case fans due to the side panels having been removed from its case.
The IBM xSeries 206 seems to be behaving itself and the computation errors that occurred on SETI and QMC don’t seem to be a long term problem. The history of this machine is interesting; I was walking past the trash-can area of our office building and noticed that one of the other tenants had thrown out an x-Series case. I slam on brakes and have a look to see if it still has a power supply … score! It does … hang on, it also has a motherboard 2 SATA drives, a CPU and 4 DIMMS. Couldn’t resist and dragged it off to my car.
Somewhat surprised later when the orphan does a POST and starts to boot SBS2003! That’s where the fun ended as a serious blue-screen arrives around login time. After a couple of minutes of playing around with the RAID utility in BIOS, I find a badly injured RAID 1 setup and despite a couple of hours spent rebuilding the array didn't fix SBS2003 . After some contemplation, I decide that Ubuntu RAID 1 looks a little bit tricky (for me at least) so I pull out one of the drives, killed the RAID and installed 32-bit Ubuntu (the IBM didn’t like the 64 bit version!)
The first couple of work-units returned errors and I thought that there must be a CPU/memory/motherboard problem but can't track anything down. Looking at the SETI website, I see the problem work-units all mention SSE3, which this machine doesn’t support. Its got a single Pentium 4 3.0 HT CPU that only has SSE2, the work units that mention SSE2 in the header appear to work fine. No idea what was going wrong with the QMC units, they just appeared to loose the heartbeat!
Apart from crunching, this machine now runs Apache and is visible to everyone on the other side of our router. It is the ideal machine for this as there is absolutely no user data on the drive. It also allows me to use XMing from my laptop when I need Linux with a chunk of RAM (e.g. to run GIMP)

GPUGrid

We all saw this coming! I couldn't wait for SETI@home to start distributing CUDA work units.
Joined GPUGrid and all seems to be working fine, I get "Running (0.04 CPU's, 1 CUDA). The only problem is that my little 8600GT is a bit slow and the "To Completion" time is ticking up steadily.

I'm a bit worried about temperatures until I get another case fan, so have the side off the case and a desk fan blowing towards it. Getting a comfortable 57 degrees Celsius from nvidia-settings.

GPU0 vs GPU1 and CUDA

Well, a couple of hours after I got BOINC to recognize my CUDA card under Ubuntu, I decided that there was a better way to set up my machine.

The computer in question is a home computer that gets used for email and a bit of web browsing and some really old games (via Wine). Generally the graphics card doesn't do much work. As my CUDA card (Nvidia Geforce 8600GT) only has 256M RAM, I decided that I would use the motherboard's built in Geforce 7050M to run the monitor.

Using "nvidia-settings" from the Ubuntu repository, I set the monitor on the 7050, disabled it on the 8600GT and rebooted. I did set the BIOS default card to the onboard 7050 to be able to see the POST and pre-login screens.

Guess what? No CUDA device found by BOINC on reboot!

After another hour of so, it seems as if BOINC just doesn't see the CUDA card on about 50% of startups regardless of whether it is set as GPU0 or GPU1. I resorted to using "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client stop" and "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client start" a couple of times before I got the required results. While this is OK in winter when the machine stays on for days at a time, it is a pain in the hot weather as I boot, check my mail etc and then turn it off again.

The three "24/7" office machines are turned off this weekend as the aircon is on a timer and as a result doesn't work on the weekends. As Sydney is having temperatures of 40+ Celsius, it seemed like a good idea to loose a couple of places in exchange for working PC's on Monday morning.

CUDA & Ubuntu

After messing with almost every setting on my home computer, it turns out there is one really really important little line that no-one really mentions:

sudo adduser boinc video

It enables Boinc to see the CUDA graphics card! Without this, it just does not work! It seems that you cant do this from the System > Administration > Users & Groups (at least I couldnt find a way!).

I am using the 180 driver from the Ubuntu repository, Boinc ver 6.4.5 from www.getdeb.com and a Nvidia 8600GT graphics card on 64-bit Ubuntu 8.10.

So ... Boinc now recognises the CUDA device ... just have to wait for Seti to start sending out CUDA workunits for Linux!