A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home
Summary This week we crossed the 1000 users-with-credit threshold! Thanks again for all our volunteers!
GPU week, part 1. This week was consumed with developing and releasing to testing CUDA clients. The good news, when they work, they do provide a nice performance boost. The bad news, there are a lot of kinks to work out yet. Currently, we've released a windows/CUDA and linux/CUDA binary. The windows binary works if the user has the right environment (cuda 10.2 is known to work). The linux/CUDA binary was just released 48 hours ago and currently is broken in new and surprising ways not seen in our internal testing. Both apps will need some server-side changes to only allow hosts that can meet these minimum requirements. Luckily, that's why we have the "mldstest" application to find these issues before we release to the main channel!
Also, the GPU apps are much larger than our current CPU app, and have wildly different resource requirements. So much so, that we will likely be releasing them as a separate app to run alongside the CPU apps with their own WUs. That way we can isolate GPU WUs from CPU WUs and keep everyone happy and crunching.
If you're interested in testing, please make sure you have "Run test applications?" and "Use NVIDIA GPU?" checked in your project preferences, and follow/post your experience in the forum.
News:
- We expect to have most CUDA issues ironed out and have them in general (non-beta) use by next week. ROCm support would be next, but it is a lower priority.
Datasets 1,2 and 3 continue crunching away. GREAT progress so far!
Tweaks to internal flops specifications for WUs are leading the client to overestimate how long a WU will take to complete (some have estimates of days to complete, despite being the same WUs as before that should take 4-10 hours). We believe these should even out over time, but if this continues to be an issue we'll back that estimate back down again on new WUs.
With the development/release of the GPU client, not much progress was made last week on other parts of the project such as preparing a DS3 100x100 for release, a related paper for arXiv, dataset 4, etc.. Those of course remain important, but there is a finite amount of developer time and we've chosen to prioritize getting the GPU apps ready for the next week or so to speed up completion for the next round of paper deadlines around mid-December.
Project status snapshot:
(note these numbers are approximations)
Tasks Tasks ready to send 17159 Tasks in progress 22491 Users With credit 1020 Registered in past 24 hours 66 Hosts With recent credit 2051 Registered in past 24 hours 53 Current GigaFLOPS 30532.46
Dataset 1 and 2 progress:
SingleDirectMachine 10002/10004 EightBitMachine 10001/10006 SingleInvertMachine 10001/10003 SimpleXORMachine 10000/10002 ParityMachine 884/10005 ParityModified 275/10005 EightBitModified 6492/10006 SimpleXORModified 10005/10005 SingleDirectModified 10004/10004 SingleInvertModified 10002/10002
Dataset 3 progress:
Overall (so far): 37600/40425 Milestone 1, 100x100: 10000/10000 Milestone 2, 100x1000: 37600/100000 Milestone 3: 100x10000: 37600/1000000
Last week's TWIM Notes: Oct 19 2020
Thanks again to all our volunteers!
-- The MLC@Home Admins
Source: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/for ... php?id=108