Hi!
I've tried to crunch on NVIDIA Quadro FX 570.
http://www.ps3grid.net/workunit.php?wuid=64568
4 days for one WU to report is too short.
Now I have 112 hours of crunching (73,67% of progress).
So to crunch WU's for GPUgrid I have to have at least 8 days to report unit.

My question is:
Is it possible to make the time to report a little bit longer (for example 10 days)?

Hi!
I've tried to crunch on NVIDIA Quadro FX 570.
http://www.ps3grid.net/workunit.php?wuid=64568
4 days for one WU to report is too short.
Now I have 112 hours of crunching (73,67% of progress).
So to crunch WU's for GPUgrid I have to have at least 8 days to report unit.

My question is:
Is it possible to make the time to report a little bit longer (for example 10 days)?

Hi!
My question is:
Is it possible to make the time to report a little bit longer (for example 10 days)?

The answer is NO.

Basic reason: The science is needed back quickly, hence the current deadline.
Additionally some resutls, once returned are resent to another user for additional processing, this can happen many times. With long deadlines it takes too much time to get the final result.

So, maybe it is possible to make shorter WUs with the same 4-days-deadline?

1 week deadline for slower cards (8600GT), every contribution are useful!

By doing that you would actually slow the project down. Sure, they could work on a bit more different work in parallel, but they'd have to wait longer for results. The point of this project is to build a fast supercomputer.
And if you start with longer deadlines for slower GPUs, why stop at 32 shaders? Wouldn't the owners of 16 and 8 shader GPUs demand the same special treatment?

MrS

It would take quite some work to make sure BOINC wouldn't distribute longer WUs to slower clients. I guess it's not very high on the priority list.

NO for longer deadline...
NO for shorter WU`s...

Then mby two different WU`s? With possibility to choose in Profile (as it is for example in CPDN project)?


It`s just an idea - pls don`t kill me for that ;)
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I can't answer exactly for the project team, but my gut feeling is that we, users, project and developers, are concentrating on getting 1 aspect working first. If you attempt too much at once you just get more confusion and problems. Once things are more perfect with boinc and the gpu ahndling, I'm sure efforts will go into development for other areas, ie slower cards, ATI, etc.

As it stands now, boinc is already capable of handling this, although it has not been tested.

The client already sends complete info about the GPU to the server,
at least everything returned by the CUDA API.

This info is passed to the scheduler, which can use it to
decide which app to send and to estimate job completion time.

However to implement this is not as easy as the above makes it sound. Special habndling is needed, FPOPS estimate for the gpu requesting work and then separate apps for each instance slow vs fast GPUs. The scheduler can then match short jobs to slow cards and long jobs to fast cards. But even with this, time restrictions of the science, the necessity of results within a certain deadline, may not mean that smaller or shorter tasks will benefit the current application.

There are plans for additional uses for the GPU and CPU by this project, possibly those uses may benifit those not able to participate at the current moment. There have been hints about this. But liek I said ebfore, we need to get one thing working well first.

The thing to remember is all this is really new, only about 8 months so far has gone into the development, so GPU computing is still in its infancy.

Mh, they could easily reduce the number of steps in each WU, trading off file transfer overhead for shorter computation times. That would still slow the project down on average though, as you'd get less work done in the same time. I don't know how much of a slow-down would be tolerable.

"That would still slow the project" - I think I can't agree with that.
Example:
You have 20 strongmen. Each is carrying 50 stones at once from place to place.
And you send them help - 50 normal men, that each can carry 15 stones in the same time.
When the work will be done faster (in the same time)?
In the first situation or in the second?

I've just had to abort two WUs because I couldn't manage to crunch them.
I use my PC in cycle:
getting back from work,
use for browsing/other stuff - 2-3 hours, then some games 2 hours (have to suspend crunching on my GPU during play) and then power off as I'm off to bed.

I've been crunching Seti@Home since 1999, and been in boinc since the begining and I can tell you one thing:
The deadline is too short.

You will se many people coming in and going shortly afterwards just because of way too short deadline.

My 8800GT does the WU in 11h, in comparsion - my CPU does a Seti@Home WU in about 3h and S@H gives three weeks deadline, but still I manage to crunch one/two every evening...

And PLEASE, remember that people who actually buy graphics cards capable of proper crunching are VERY likely into games, so vast majority of the PC being on is when they play, and then they have to suspend computing because of bad performance in games.

I believe, that that's why BETA crunch is all about, to find problems and solve them. One of them is the deadline being to short, and it's one of the easiest problems to solve...

I just hope that someone will listen to an experienced BOINC user. ;)

Shorter deadlines would make it impossible for me to crunch on my XP 64 PC. Every WU with a runtime less than 8 hours has a consumption >= 71 MB of the video memory. After 2 days over 420 MB video memory are used and I have to restart the PC, otherwise he will crash all WUs at the third day. With a shorter deadline I have to stop crunching, while I can't restart the PC every day. I'm not home often enough.
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I use Rivatuner. With loaded plugin vidmem.dll the program can show the actual video memory consumption. On a fresh startet XP 64 the first WU use 70.32 MB. If the second WU is started, 138.63 MB are shown as used. The next WU shows 206.88, then 275.57 MB, then 343.82 MB and so on. On the third day all video memory is used and every WU will crash.
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@ETA: On this one XP64 machine is also installed a Vista 64, so I can use Vista and avoid this problem. But at the moment I use XP and know, that I have to restart every 2 days. When I'm longer absent, I switch to Vista.
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