Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

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10esseetony
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Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by 10esseetony »

I am thinking ahead to a Sprint or the Pentathlon. So I may be posting some ramblings about various projects. Nothing Earth shattering, just results, thoughts, and anything I may have learned.

Amicable GPU is a tough cookie. The older 10*20 app, people were running up to 16 tasks at a time to get the GPU utilized 100%. No more. 10*21 app is a resource hog.
  • First of all, one task will now send your card to 100% usage.
  • Secondly, each task requires 8GB of SYSTEM RAM. Make sure your page file is enabled! :)
  • Third, each task will use a lot of CPU upfront, calculating the 8GB of Primes that go into RAM, then CPU usage drops dramatically. Leave at least one thread free per task.
  • Fourth, because of the third note above, processor performance matters for this GPU project.
Under your preferences, you can select....uhm....kernel size I think it is called. Tasks are worth 6,836.19 points.

I used kernel size 23 for my much newer Nvidia cards, and kernel size 21 for my poor old R9-280X's in this test.
  • RTX 2080Ti - 300 seconds - 70 seconds of CPU (R9-3800X) sample size of 3 tasks. Usage unknown - Linux
  • GTX 1070 - 1707 seconds - 121 seconds CPU (i7-5820K) sample size of 1 task. Usage 100% - Windows
  • R9-280X - 3930 seconds - 730 seconds of CPU (FX8320E) sample size of 2 tasks. Usage 98% - Windows. BOINC wisely did not fire up the 3rd card due to only 16GB of system RAM
Skillz
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by Skillz »

nvidia-smi is the name of the tool to get GPU stats such as usage and temperature.
crashtech
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by crashtech »

I remember being pretty shocked at the new RAM requirement, one of my headless machines had only 8GB and running Amicable would cause it to become unresponsive. Took me a while to figure out what the problem was!
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10esseetony
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by 10esseetony »

Thanks, Skillz. Nvidia-smi just gives an instantaneous 'snap-shot', correct? I used it for Collatz, and got 94%. Good to know we no longer have to do a bunch of hoop jumping to get max results. Bad to know the next set of numbers will cripple the current gen of GPUs. :)
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by Skillz »

You need to use the loop parameter to get it to refresh. For example:

--loop=1000

Will refresh the results every 1 second.
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by crashtech »

I use psensor, which is I guess a bit clunky, but it can generate a real-time graph of GPU usage.
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Re: Amicable numbers, 10*21, GPU

Post by StefanR5R »

10esseetony wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 8:54 am Nvidia-smi just gives an instantaneous 'snap-shot', correct?
Skillz wrote: Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:11 am You need to use the loop parameter to get it to refresh. For example:

--loop=1000

Will refresh the results every 1 second.
Or for a compact table layout, which gets you a nice history as large as the scrollback buffer of your terminal:

Code: Select all

nvidia-smi dmon -d 30
The last parameter is the logging interval in seconds.
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