Hello, I am new to BOINC as of yesterday. I have a fair number of computers I plan to install BOINC on. These computers are in two different configurations. One of these configurations has no usable GPU, and the other has an nvidia 8800GT.

Currently, I am testing BOINC on just one computer of each configuration. BOINC is not recognizing the 8800GT (I am running AQUA as my project). I just updated my driver to the most recent one, and rebooted. I am running Windows XP 32 bit.

9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Starting BOINC client version 6.10.58 for windows_intelx86
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Libraries: libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Data directory: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\BOINC
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Running under account admin
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Processor: 2 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz [Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 11]
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Processor: 4.00 MB cache
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss htt tm pni ssse3 cx16 nx lm vmx tm2 dca pbe
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM OS: Microsoft Windows XP: Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Memory: 3.25 GB physical, 5.09 GB virtual
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Disk: 465.70 GB total, 432.17 GB free
9/15/2010 11:47:27 AM Local time is UTC -5 hours
9/15/2010 11:47:30 AM No usable GPUs found
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM AQUA@home URL http://aqua.dwavesys.com/; Computer ID 64122; resource share 100
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM No general preferences found - using BOINC defaults
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM Reading preferences override file
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM Preferences:
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM max memory usage when active: 1662.79MB
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM max memory usage when idle: 2993.02MB
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM max disk usage: 10.00GB
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM suspend work if non-BOINC CPU load exceeds 75 %
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM (to change preferences, visit the web site of an attached project, or select Preferences in the Manager)
9/15/2010 11:47:31 AM Not using a proxy
9/15/2010 11:47:32 AM AQUA@home Restarting task iq64ET10_100912d_3_188_0 using IQUANA version 114
9/15/2010 12:24:22 PM Running CPU benchmarks
9/15/2010 12:24:23 PM Suspending computation - running CPU benchmarks
9/15/2010 12:24:54 PM Benchmark results:
9/15/2010 12:24:54 PM Number of CPUs: 2
9/15/2010 12:24:54 PM 1917 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
9/15/2010 12:24:54 PM 3922 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
9/15/2010 12:24:55 PM Resuming computation

Also, the computers with onboard GPUs are, to be polite, slow. Their estimated time to completion is 2 days past the report deadline. Does this mean their work is wasted? Should I switch them to another project with a more lenient deadline?

I just updated my driver to the most recent one.

Where from? If Windows Update, then do know that these drivers do not contain the CUDA supplement. You will have to install the drivers from the Nvidia site.

As for your other question, that's your own decision. Depending on how much memory they have of their own, they cannot be used everywhere, though. BOINC will only recognize the GPU's own memory, not memory added towards it from the main system memory. Most projects have a minimum requirement of 256MB, although Collatz may have 128Mb (not sure).

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Currently, I am testing BOINC on just one computer of each configuration. BOINC is not recognizing the 8800GT (I am running AQUA as my project).

Also, be aware that at present, AQUA is not making any work available for GPU processing - their multi-threaded CPU application handles the kind of work they need processed far more efficiently than GPUs do. (See the posts by the project administrators on the AQUA message boards for fuller details).

The only reason the CUDA app is loaded on their servers (and hence AQUA is listed as a CUDA project by BOINC) is to make the "Use NVIDIA GPU" preference visible on their website, so users can switch off the futile work requests.....

I just updated my driver to the most recent one.

Where from? If Windows Update, then do know that these drivers do not contain the CUDA supplement. You will have to install the drivers from the Nvidia site.

As for your other question, that's your own decision. Depending on how much memory they have of their own, they cannot be used everywhere, though. BOINC will only recognize the GPU's own memory, not memory added towards it from the main system memory. Most projects have a minimum requirement of 256MB, although Collatz may have 128Mb (not sure).

I proved Collatz worked on 128MB GPU's, so Collatz lowered the Memory requirement to 126Mb,
i think they have lowered it to 112Mb now, not too sure (because of Nvidia's 197.xx and later drivers reporting less memory),
Haris Dublas has since reported he could get Collatz's Cuda apps to run on his 8200 GPU with it's memory set in the Bios to only 64Mb,

Claggy

Thanks Richard, that makes a lot of sense. I was wondering what AQUA was doing that'd use the GPU!

I went directly to NVidia's site for my card to download the driver, which gave me a different driver then when I went to the page you linked to. Downloaded the driver from that page and got it working! Thanks, Ageless.

9/16/2010 2:50:55 PM NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce 8800 GT (driver version 25896, CUDA version 3010, compute capability 1.1, 512MB, 336 GFLOPS peak)

Thank you Claggy (and all the others) who have contributed in some way to making it easy for me to put what resources I have to good use with only minimal effort.

Also, I was reading the report deadline month wrong... even my slow computers will make it by a few weeks. :)