Hi,

I am pretty new to BOINC and World Community Grid. I have a NVIDIA GT540M GPU with CUDA support which I would like to use. I am on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit. My BOINC version is 7.0.27(x86) which I installed from the official package repository. I thought it should have been 7.0.27(x86_64) since I am on a 64-bit system, but since I installed from the official repo I think that shouldn't be a problem. I have installed Bumblebee[1] for supporting my Optimus technology, which is basically switchable graphics with automatic switching. I added CUDA support by following the instructions here [2]. Following is the output the command

lspci | grep VGA

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 540M] (rev ff)

The first few lines of my Event Log are as follows :

Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Starting BOINC client version 7.0.27 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Libraries: libcurl/7.22.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1 zlib/1.2.3.4 libidn/1.23 librtmp/2.3
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Processor: 4 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz [Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7]
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Processor: 3.00 MB cache
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | 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 ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | OS: Linux: 3.2.0-31-generic
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Memory: 3.77 GB physical, 256.00 MB virtual
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Disk: 28.59 GB total, 12.17 GB free
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Local time is UTC +5 hours
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | No usable GPUs found
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Config: GUI RPC allowed from:
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | A new version of BOINC is available. <a href=http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php>Download it.</a>
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | fightmalaria@home | URL http://boinc.ucd.ie/fmah/; Computer ID 5109; resource share 100
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | LHC@home 1.0 | URL http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/; Computer ID 10000277; resource share 100
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | yoyo@home | URL http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/; Computer ID 79757; resource share 100
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | fightmalaria@home | General prefs: from fightmalaria@home (last modified 05-Oct-2012 10:33:53)
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | fightmalaria@home | Host location: none
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | fightmalaria@home | General prefs: using your defaults
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Reading preferences override file
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | Preferences:
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | max memory usage when active: 1932.46MB
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | max memory usage when idle: 3478.43MB
Fri 05 Oct 2012 04:53:30 PM IST | | max disk usage: 12.23GB

I would like to know how to get BOINC to detect my NVIDIA GPU.

I know this post might be lacking in important information, so please tell me if you need anything else to debug it.

Thanks in advance.

[1] - http://bumblebee-project.org/install.html#Ubuntu
[2] - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Cuda

You'll need Nvidia manufacturer drivers, such as these: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-304.51-driver.html

For future references, see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing. Also do know that we are not the World Community Grid. They've got their own forums at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/index

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Thanks for the quick reply.

I checked my Synaptic Package Manager and this is what I see :

http://imgur.com/aLyPp
http://imgur.com/ewtzK

which means I have the latest nvidia driver installed. I don't remember installing this, by downloading the "run" file from the official website and then executing it and configuring x server, in the past. I think it must have gotten installed when I was installing Bumblebee. So I think I have the latest driver for my graphics card.

It should work but it's not working. Any ideas about what should I try next ?

PS : See the bbswitch-dkms kernel module that's installed (in the second screenshot). Could that be causing any problems.

Did you install those drivers through the package manager? If so, really try the ones from Nvidia first. It's possible that the package maintainers built the videocard drivers to just run and show 2D graphics, perhaps a bit 3D graphics, not that they added all the extra stuff as CUDA and OpenCL capability.

If BOINC cannot find any CUDA or OpenCL capability, it's because it couldn't find the files that the drivers install (libcuda.so for CUDA support and libOpenCL.so for OpenCL support), if the drivers did actually install those files and they're in a directory that BOINC can read in. When BOINC can't find those files, then it can't tell you what kind of GPU you have. Simple.

Apropos, the BOINC from repositories is also something we can't give official support on, as Berkeley didn't build this version of BOINC, but the package maintainers did. Any big problems should be reported to the maintainers. Also, the recommended Berkeley BOINC version is 7.0.28, and has been so for the past 4.5 months. Perhaps that the Ubuntu package maintainers would want to be so kind and go release the recommended version, instead of a beta one.

P.S: It wasn't really necessary to go open a ticket about this, as you're already receiving help through the forums, plus the version you have isn't a Berkeley version.

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I picked this up from PM and posted it here, as it doesn't help anyone else with the same problem when we continue it in PM. I must say up front that I am not a Linux guru, my main OS support is Windows.

That said, in Windows it's also required that you use the videocard driver from the GPU's manufacturer to get all this stuff working. When you use the Windows supplied driver, it lacks CUDA, OpenGL and OpenCL components because these are direct competitors to things Microsoft supply themselves (Direct Compute and DirectX). Under Linux it's probably easier to supply a driver that lacks these components as you don't necessarily have all the required drivers on your system and the package maintainers will always seek the easiest path of no resistance, not give you bulky packages bursting with their own libraries.

I see it says the same thing in point 1 of the first link, specifically By default Ubuntu will use the open source video driver called Nouveau for your NVIDIA graphics card. This driver lacks support for 3D acceleration and may not work with the very latest video cards or technologies from NVIDIA.

That's the case here, so you really need to find a way to install the Nvidia supplied drivers. I already linked to the Nvidia drivers for your GT540M. But in case you did not see, here it is again: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-304.51-driver.html. Click on Supported Products to see GeForce 500M series: GTX 580M, GTX 570M, GTX 560M, GT 555M, GT 550M, GT 540M, GT 525M, GT 520MX, GT 520M.

As far as I know, it's an executable file that you download, so all you have to do is save it to a convenient place wait for the Additional drivers icon to show up, then click that. The difficult thing here is the part of you uninstalling the Nouveau driver, but since it says it isn't necessary, why worry about it?

Hi,

Thanks for the replies on my post and sorry for filing an issue on the bug tracking system. If I understand correctly, you wanted me to uninstall the drivers from the official package repository and install the ones from the official website manually, right ?

Afaik, this is a difficult process. I tried using [1] but it didn't seem to show any restricted drivers available for my system. I read [2] but that seems a bit complicated and with the ample use of warning signs on the page, I'm a bit scared (put off, would be the right word). Is that how I am supposed to install it ? Is there some easier method/way ? I downloaded the official driver from [3] and read [4] (which btw is huge :P) but couldn't feel confident enough to go ahead with it.

I just wanted to know if there's an easier method you might know of or if you have tried the steps told above and it worked for you ?

I know I sound extremely noobish, but when it comes to driver installation in Linux, I really become one :s

Thanks in advance.


[1] - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
[2] - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual
[3] - http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/49073
[4] - http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/304.51/README/index.html

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