A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home
Summary This week MLC@Home turns 100 days old! Since the beginning, we've released 3 datasets worth of WUs, released many application updates, rolled out support for 3 new architectures on Linux, and rolled out Windows support. But we're just getting started.
It's been a busy week: Dataset 3 is approaching its first milestone of 100 networks for 100 samples (100x100), and its only been ~15 days. Badges went live on the site. We benchmarked Dataset 3 WUs on a GPU (40% speedup on AMD ROCm). We even some potential movement on OSX support. Read on to find out more.
But first, an apology: we had a server glitch today where the work scheduler was unavailable for several hours. We've corrected the problem and taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Next, MLC@Home was happy to roll out badges this week. There are now badges for top RAC percentage, and milestone badges for hitting credit milestones per app. Currently, only new credit (as of Oct 1) is counted towards milestones, but by the end of this week we should be able to get all previous credit counted towards them as well. So if you don't have a badge yet, please be patient, its coming. We're also offering a special Early Adopter badge to anyone who has credit by our 100th day, October 8th. Consider it a small token of thanks for supporting our new project.
News:
- Dataset 3 WUs processing going fantastically, much faster than anticipated. We're almost at the first milestone (100x100), and have released more WUs towards the next milestone (100x1000). Once we reach 100x100 (see chart on home page for updates, we'll do some preliminary analysis and release that Dataset to the public.
Datasets 1+2 continue also to make progress in parallel with Dataset 3, but its slow going for now. We may spend some cycles seeing if we can speed up those remaining WUs. We'll do an official release of a preliminary Dataset (1+2) once we have at least 1000 examples of each machine type.
New server arrived at the university last week, it'll be in our hands tomorrow. Please be on the lookout for an announcement of scheduled maintenance downtime later this week or weekend as we transition to a more powerful and more permanent server. More information about badges available here: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/forum_thread.php?id=88 . We'll use the downtime to make sure old credit gets counted towards badges.
GPU support: GPUs were a net loss for Dataset 1+2 WUs, but we recently hacked the client to work with AMD ROCm and tested Dataset 3 WUs and achieved a 40% speedup on a VEGA56. We would expect a similar speedup on CUDA hardware as well, which means we're moving GPU support up in the priority. Discussion here: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/forum_thread.php?id=89
Dataset 4 WUs (MNIST/TorjAI-based) remain in development.
We're evaluating using Darling as a way to finally support OSX. Nothing to report yet.
Project status snapshot:
(note these numbers are approximations)
Tasks Tasks ready to send 33935 Tasks in progress 15329 Users With credit 793 Registered in past 24 hours 30 Hosts With recent credit 1994 Registered in past 24 hours 14 Current GigaFLOPS 31291.44
Dataset 1 and 2 progress:
SingleDirectMachine 10002/10004 EightBitMachine 10001/10006 SingleInvertMachine 10001/10003 SimpleXORMachine 10000/10002 ParityMachine 774/10005 ParityModified 203/10005 EightBitModified 6111/10006 SimpleXORModified 10005/10005 SingleDirectModified 10004/10004 SingleInvertModified 10002/10002
Dataset 3 progress:
Overall (so far): 10232/20112 Milestone 1, 100x100: 9357/10000 Milestone 2, 100x1000: 10232/100000 Milestone 3: 100x10000: 10232/1000000
Last week's TWIM Notes: Sep 28 2020
Thanks again to all our volunteers!
-- The MLC@Home Admins
Source: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/for ... .php?id=94