Everything to Know About GPUGrid

[Otis11]

Ok, well I've got half an hour to kill and since this is your biggest hole PG, I'll start trying to put a dent in it. ANY AND ALL HELP IS GREATLY APPRECIATED. This is and will be a work in progress till I get time to sit down and make it thorough, but heck, why not start now? Here it goes:


Note : This is a work in progress and looks like it might take a while to complete. If you're joining and have any questions don't hesitate to post or PM me, I'd be glad to help.
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On behalf of the Xtreme Systems GPUGrid team, I would like to welcome you to the GPUGrid forum! Whether you're just looking around or an xtreme cruncher, this is where you can find anything and everything related to GPUGrid and BOINC.

GPUGrid:

What is it?

Volunteer computing for biomedicine

GPUGRID.net is a novel distributed supercomputing infrastructure made of many NVIDIA graphics cards joined together to deliver high-performance all-atom biomolecular simulations. The molecular simulations performed by our volunteers are some of the most common types performed by scientists in the field, but they are also some of the most computationally demanding and usually require a supercomputer.
Running GPUGRID on GPUs innovates volunteer computing by delivering supercomputing class applications on a cost effective infrastructure which will greatly impact the way biomedical research is performed.
Be part of it.

If you enjoy science, you can participate by donating computing time to scientific research. Simply follow the instructions to start, gain your credits for the results you return, join a team, meet and exchange experiences with other participants in the forums.


What have WE accomplished?

As of November 2009, GPUGRID is the world’s 6th DC
project in data production and the world’s 1st in Bio-molecular
simulations (source boincstats.com).

Modeling macromolecular system is computationally expensive and traditionally requires costly high-performance computing resources. Through the use of the GPU resources of non-dedicated desktop and workstation computers, GPUGRID has created an infrastructure to form the basis of a robust system for high-throughput accurate binding affinity prediction.

A useful overview of GPUGrid and it's accomplishments. For a more in depth look at the science, start here.

Here is a list of publications for further research.

What does GPUGrid research specifically?

BOINC:

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkele...work_Computing

FAQs:

So I want to help, but how do I know if my card is compatible?

Any CUDA-compatible NVIDIA Graphics Cards on 32/64-bit Windows or 64-bit Linux is capable of contributing to the GPUGrid project, although it is recommended that you use a 2xx series card, many members have used other cards to help the cause. Here is a chart for further reference.

Great, I installed BOINC and attached to GPUGrid, but get the message "No NVIDIA GPU found." What's wrong?

Check that you have installed the latest drivers here. Although >185.xx are acceptable, we recommend 186.xx or higher for the new ACEMD WUs.
Also, please check that you have a new version of BOINC (>6.10.17)
BOINC for Windows 64-bit/32-bit
Linux 64-bit




Guides:
Installing Boinc and Joining the Grid


Stats:

Xtremesystems GPUGRID team and member rank
XS Team Stats @ Free DC
XS Team Stats @ BOINCstats
XS Individual Stats @ BOINCstats


More:

What Does GPUGrid research Specifically?
tips, tricks, and tidbits for GPU crunching
GPUGrid OCing help thread
Cruncher Lingo Dictionary
XS Milestones thread
Pie- Perfection In Execution Thread

_________________________________________________

So that's all I've got in me for now.

If you see a problem, please point it out.

If you'd like to help, you're my new best friend.

And to our new members PLEASE post any questions you had to include in the FAQ. If you know the answer, please include it, but if not, I or one of my new best friends will look it up.

Again, work in progress, and a ton more to do...

Thanks in advance for your help guys!

[Otis11]

Hey guys, trying to get this going pretty quick... If anyone is willing to help with any guides or even just has an idea for a guide that would be helpful (regardless of whether you can make it) please post or PM me.

I'll get through as much as I can as quickly as I can... right now I'm making an outline of what's needed and just going down the list...

Thanks in advance for the ideas guys!

Oh - and I need as many FAQ as you can come up with... Doesn't matter if you know the answer or not, I can find it if I need to... Just need to know what I'm looking for!

[MikeB12]

I forsee a sticky coming soon. Thanks, Dave.

good job otis.

[PoppaGeek]

Great job Otis, link added!

[WhiteFireDragon]

great guides! i made an account a while back, but unable to use GPU's to crunch because i found out it's only limited to nvidia cards. for some reason, all my nice cards are ATI, and my nvidia cards are too weak . any idea when they can expand this to ATI's? the computational power would double if this is ever possible

[PoppaGeek]

great guides! i made an account a while back, but unable to use GPU's to crunch because i found out it's only limited to nvidia cards. for some reason, all my nice cards are ATI, and my nvidia cards are too weak . any idea when they can expand this to ATI's? the computational power would double if this is ever possible

They tried to develop a ATI client but even a 5870 was too slow. Hardware design issue. IIRC it had to do with cache on the card. Nvidia has alot more so less trips to the system memory.

I too was disappointed. Wanted to go with a 5850.

[lkiller123]

great guides! i made an account a while back, but unable to use GPU's to crunch because i found out it's only limited to nvidia cards. for some reason, all my nice cards are ATI, and my nvidia cards are too weak . any idea when they can expand this to ATI's? the computational power would double if this is ever possible

Just give them a lift at MilkyWay@Home or Collatz for now, they would love it.

[Otis11]

So the Joining GPUGrid guide is done (unless anyone has anything to add...)

Any ideas of other helpful things to add? I'll summarize the work so far later, but that will take quite a while...

[WhiteFireDragon]

So the Joining GPUGrid guide is done (unless anyone has anything to add...)

Any ideas of other helpful things to add? I'll summarize the work so far later, but that will take quite a while...

one great guide i was looking for but couldn't find was some comparison graphs of ppd vs price or wattage vs ppd of different cards. then we'd know which cards are the most efficient in cost and power consumption.

since there is no guide, what's the general consensus on cards that have good ratio in these category? 9600gso? lol and where does a gtx 260 stand? i know this is not true, but it feels like it puts out more heat than my OC'ed i7

[Otis11]

one great guide i was looking for but couldn't find was some comparison graphs of ppd vs price or wattage vs ppd of different cards. then we'd know which cards are the most efficient in cost and power consumption.

since there is no guide, what's the general consensus on cards that have good ratio in these category? 9600gso? lol and where does a gtx 260 stand? i know this is not true, but it feels like it puts out more heat than my OC'ed i7

I believe the consensus is that the gtx 275 is the best bang/buck and ppd/watt, but I'd say the 260 OC'd is an arguable second...

Definitely the 2xx series are the best confirmed. I think the 4xx is going to kill it though. Waiting for some real numbers before either doubling up on my 2 series or going 4...

Oh, and for the heat, a gtx260 will put out 175W stock... so OCed you're lookin at 200W ish. The 130W i7 has a hard time keepin up with that... I'm sure if you pushed it high enough you could, but I think the gfx wins...

[vrchards]

Otix
Many many thanks for a wonderfull information. I am great fan of Playstation games so your information was very informative for me.
GPUGrid is a volunteer computing project on the PlayStation3 for full-atom molecular simulations of proteins.Your contribution is very important because our CellMD software runs over an order of magnitude faster on the PlayStation3 opening the way to innovative scientific experiments.
So I hope experiments will go on.

[werdwerdus]

help. i have GPUGrid and PrimeGrid both attatched to my BOINC client, but they aren't rotating! It is only running PrimeGrid all the time. I have both set to 100 resource share so shouldn't it switch them 1/2 the time? I have both set not to use the CPU but to use the GPU. What is going wrong?

[Snow Crash]

Not sure why they are not playing nice as I have never run PrimeGrid but I do know BOINC is still having difficulties with GPU time sharing. Perhaps occasionally you could manually intervene and force sharing by suspending one project or the other (morning and night)?

[werdwerdus]

well I think actually they were switching, I got some points for both projects, but I literally never saw GPUGrid running while I still had PrimeGrid & GPUGrid. Now I switched off PrimeGrid and running GPUGrid only.

[WhiteFireDragon]

how are the sum of the RAC's calculated? i'm trying to determine my RAC as a projection, without having to wait a week or more for points to settle

[Snow Crash]

http://www.boinc-wiki.info/RAC

[WhiteFireDragon]

how does 64bit linux ubuntu compare to 64bit XP? trying to see if i should switch my win7 to XP or linux

[werdwerdus]

I need help getting BOINC to use 2 cards in one system. Got a GTX 260 and a GT 240 in the same system, but BOINC is only using the GT 240. The monitor is plugged into that one. Device manager, nvidia control panel, gpu-z etc all see both cards but BOINC only sees thee GT 240. Using driver 197.45.

edit: well found a setting that I'm trying <use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
can't get anymore assignments for some reason though.

[Snow Crash]

It looks like you are getting 4 WUs at a time so I think BOINC Manager is recognizing you have two cards but if it is only runing one WU at a time make sure you are not running SLI.

[roki977]

With the GTX 470 I added a GTX 460 1GB. But Bionic uses only one GPU as shown in the ss.


I need help to get them running !
Tryed detaching and attaching gpu grid but nothing. OS in Win7.



Bionic recognized 460 and 470, but using only 460, Where is option to turn second gou on.

[Snow Crash]

Make sure SLI (multi GPU) is turned off in NVidia control panel.

[werdwerdus]

you can't have SLI with a 470 + 460...
and tbh my SLI 460gtx works the same with or without SLI enabled, maybe i'm just lucky. but to get both to work, makes sure this is in your cc_config.xml:


<cc_config>
<options>
<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
</options>
</cc_config>

[roki977]

It works!!! Problem was in cc_config..

In last 30days 3x2 mushkin dead, F1 750gb dead ,yesterday Asus p6t deluxe died and wd 750black died. This is unbelievable, 3 years nothing and then bammm..

i AM not sure if 470+460 is good combination on win7. 470 is now working 4 and half hour per WU, before 3h 15mins and 460 is around 6 and half hours

[werdwerdus]

Free-dc seems to be broken for individual host stats. I can only view my total stats not broken down to individual systems.

Is there somewhere else I can look for stats such as daily output per computer etc for my account?

[roki977]

http://boincstats.com
You will find your GRUgrid stats there

or maybee not for individual systems