Since I have temporary use of a Quadro RTX 3000, I've been playing with it (stress testing
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
) and decided to let it have a go at the MLC GPU app for a bit.
Running a single GPU task with the CPU idle, Task Manager in Windows showed that it was using about 1.33 CPU threads and GPU-Z showed about 25-35% GPU utilization.
I added an app_config.xml file with <gpu_usage> and <cpu_usage> both set to .33 to see what would happen. BOINC did start running three GPU tasks simultaneously, and GPU-Z jumped up to 85-90% GPU utilization. However, it seems that the project is ignoring the <cpu_usage> tag, at least on this system, since each one of the three GPU threads was now using 1.33 CPU threads of its own (4 total threads in use).
That might explain biodoc's results that showed a significant improvement in GPU usage when the CPU is idle, if the app really wants to have that much CPU available for each running task.
After about 15 minutes of running three tasks simultaneously, GPU usage dropped to zero and % progress on the tasks also stopped, even though the Elapsed timer was still counting. I let it sit that way for a while with no change, then rebooted the computer but the tasks still wouldn't proceed any more.
Then, out of curiosity I changed the app_config file to
<gpu_usage>1</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>2</cpu_usage>
to see if it would run better with even more CPU dedicated to the single GPU task.
After I loaded the config files, a single MLC task started running normally again, with GPU-Z showing around 45-50% GPU load and Task Manager still showing 1.33 CPU threads active on the task. I'm not sure what the best settings will be and don't have time to do any more testing with this system right now, but I thought I'd share my initial findings to see if they make sense to (or help) anyone else..