I just joined and have a few questions:

What is the performance difference between a Tesla M2050/70 and a GTX580 in crunching here at GPUGRID. Between the 2050 and the 2070 does it make a real difference for crunching.

I plan two install two boards in one desktop. I can have two GTX580 no problem, I know this will work. But can I have instead two M2050/70. And if I have two Tesla boards is also the standard video display function available (like in the GTX580) or I need an additional video card.

At the moment I started by running as a test an Asus Matrix GTX285 board with the CPU running on WCG tasks. It seems that all works fine between the two applications. I get only one GPUGRID WU running at a time and it runs for nearly 10 hours on the GTX285. Is this normal, good or bad performance?

Many thanks for your help

After looking at existing threads it seems that the Tesla cards at least the previous ones 10XX series were not performant against the gaming cards of the Fermi type 400 series. Does this hold true even for the new ones of the 20XX series ?

For the GPUGRID application, M20?0 cards perform about as well as a GTX470. Not that we've had one to test yet, but a GTX580 should be ~25% faster.

MJH

Ok thanks MJH. It is clear that Tesla is not the right way here. Nevertheless I am very very surprised. I understood that Tesla was the Nvidia strategy for supercomputing, massive number crunching approach. How come that the gaming boards are so much better? I understand that the design of the Fermi boards was made with a number crunching perspective but the Tesla should have been 50% more performing than the gaming boards not the opposite.

After the excellent behaviour of the test machine with both GPUGrid and WCG crunching split between CPU (i7 980X running at 4.0 Ghz) and GPU (Asus GTX285 no OC) I have added two more machines that were crunching with WCG. They are all with 6.10.58 64 bit boinc release. The machines are all Win 7 64 bit and have 980X CPUs. Same config but with an Asus GTX 280 and an Asus GTX 260. These were older boards I had anyway and were not really used. This makes three boards and three machines connected. If all goes well I may add one or two 580 boards. I refused to buy the 480 as I consider it an unfinished board. The 580 is the one that should have been released first.

Thanks skgiven, you have impressive numbers here at GPUGrid. The reason I came here is that I feel GPU processing at WCG is too far distant, and to leave some good GPU boards asleep is a pity. Some of my devices were designed to handle GPU processing for WCG, but as CPU and GPU both can run together without trouble then let's go. The projects that run here at GPUGrid have also attracted my interest.

At the moment all the cards run the 260.99 Nvidia driver. What do you mean when you say that the 197.45 driver would allow to run the faster 6.12 app. Do you mean WU's with shorter runtime, or a better use of the capability of the 200 series card which result in faster crunching the same WU.
Otherwise I do not mind that a WU lasts 10 or more hours as long as it is run efficiently.

Regarding the Win version it is a pity that W7 does not do better than XP but for me it is a no brainer. All my machines are standard on W7 64 bit Ultimate and this will not be changed. Regarding Linux I did a try at WCG but run into many problems and it was a completely new world for me. It would have needed too much effort to become literate on the subject and have things up and running as I like, so I gave up.

From what I've seen, the main advantage of the Tesla boards is that they offer more graphics memory. However, the GPUGRID applications were designed so they have no real use for this extra graphics memory.

From what I've seen, the main advantage of the Tesla boards is that they offer more graphics memory. However, the GPUGRID applications were designed so they have no real use for this extra graphics memory.