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Message boards : Number crunching : System Behavior and Performance

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Sysadmin_Ed
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Message 5020 - Posted: 28 Dec 2008 | 17:33:13 UTC

I'm a seasoned BOINC cruncher but new to this project. I'm running my first GPUGRID WU and looking at my machine's operating stats.

I'm running XP on a Q6600 quad with a NVIDIA 8600 GT GPU.

My project distribution:
1) Climate Prediction (Production) 50%,
2) Climate Prediction (Beta) 25%,
3) GPUGRID 25%.

1) It looks like some CPU cores are being timesliced/shared by all WUs which is something I haven't seen before. I guess this is because the GPUGRID task only uses a little CPU time and the other WUs are jumping from core to core to utilize the capacity. Is this correct?

2) I can tell that my GPU is being heavily taxed, but the total CPU load across all four cores is in the 90% to 100% range (constantly varying) - so there is some slippage happening here. I assume that the GPU's contribution more than makes up for the slippage - that there is a net gain in throughput here. Is this correct?

3) Are there any numbers indicating overall performance gain in a configuration like this?

Sysadmin_Ed
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Message 5065 - Posted: 30 Dec 2008 | 3:25:13 UTC - in response to Message 5020.
Last modified: 30 Dec 2008 | 3:25:34 UTC

Never mind my questions above... I've decided to detach from the project once this WU is complete. My 8600 GT GPU is just too slow for this, in addition to royally beating up my machine's performance regarding other projects' WUs and generating a lot of extra heat. I should have opted for a better graphics card when I put this machine together.

The GPUGRID task has been running for 27 hours now, showing 44% complete and 35 hours left to go :^(

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Message boards : Number crunching : System Behavior and Performance

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