Nvidia question, how many 680 GPUs can you put in a cruncher? AMD 79xx is only 2

[StitchExperimen]

Nvidia question, how many 680 GPUs can you put in a cruncher? AMD 79xx is only 2 GPUs

How many is the minimum concurrent units that need to be processed? With 79xx it is 8.

[Snow Crash]

I'm running more nvidia on this project than I really want to say ... but ... 2 is the barest concurrent to get load to 99% gpu usage, I run 4 concurrent.

[Snow Crash]

Someone asked me about running concurrent WUs so I'm posting a quick refresher ...

Adding an app_config.xml file to your WCG project folder allows you to control the number of concurrent WUs BOINC will run.

1. BOINC 7.0.40 or higher is required (I'm using 7.0.42)
2. Create a named app_config.xml in your worldcommunitygrid.org project folder (should be inside your BOINC Program Data folder)
3. If using notepad make sure you select 'all file types' before saving so it does not add .txt at the end of the filename
4. Copy / Paste the code below into the file, save and then close the file
5. Stop BOINC (make sure you fully stop BOINC and not just close the Manager)
6. Restart BOINC

The app_config below will run 4 gpu WUs at a time on a single card system.
At the same time it leaves 4 threads of an 8 thread system to run CPU tasks.
To stop runing cpu completely go to your WCG profile and enter No where is says 'run cpu tasks'

<app_config>
   <app>
      <name>hcc1</name>
      <max_concurrent>4</max_concurrent>
      <gpu_versions>
         <gpu_usage>0.25</gpu_usage>
         <cpu_usage>1.0</cpu_usage>
      </gpu_versions>
   </app>
</app_config>

[StitchExperimen]

Thanks,

There's a guy and his family on Kickstart who is starting funding for a project to determine optimal cruncher parts for DC.

Any idea how a Tesla K20 would perform? when it first came out it was ~$3,000 now its $3500.

[Snow Crash]

When talking about GPUs you can't really say what is best as both camps have strong suites and most projects write their app code for a specific hardware target. If you are going to build a "cruncher only" machine the choices typically come down to Intel CPU and then AMD or NVidia based on the projects that interest you most. I'm not impressed with someone raising money to figure this out ... I'm sceptical and imagine he is going to just build his own cruncher with nothing really ever being given back to the community. If you are intereseted in processing stats by project and hardware there is a BOINC project called WU Prop (http://wuprop.boinc-af.org/index.php) that does exactly that ... it capture the statistics of the BOINC projects running on your machine and then displays the aggregate of all users broken out by a large variety of aspects.

Tesla would be a waste of money on any BOINC project ... but if you did have one GPUGrid would be the place to go.