Stefan Ehmann
2020-Mar-21 10:38 UTC
HOWTO donate CPU to the fight against the Corona-virus
On Thursday, March 19, 2020 8:57:45 AM CET Alexander Leidinger via freebsd- stable wrote:> Hi, > > if someone wants to donate some FreeBSD based CPU resources to the > fight against the Corona-virus, here is a quick HOWTO in terms of > installing the Folding at Home client on FreeBSD: > > https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2020/03/19/fighting-the-coronavirus-with-free > bsd-foldinghome/ >Unfortunately, (using a CPU slot for the same work unit) TPF is 2-3 times slower than on Ubuntu for me. Much of the speed difference seems to be related to libOpenCL. If remove libOpenCL on Ubuntu, it's still 20-30% faster than on FreeBSD. Don't know how stable the TPF numbers are, so numbers may be bogus. Will a CPU slot also use the GPU with libOpenCL or is it just using better optimized code? I tried to install libOpenCL but all I get is: OpenCL: Not detected: clGetPlatformIDs() returned -1001 Since there's no CUDA support for FreeBSD, I guess there is no point in trying getting GPU slots to work.
Alexander Leidinger
2020-Mar-21 11:07 UTC
HOWTO donate CPU to the fight against the Corona-virus
Quoting Stefan Ehmann <shoesoft at gmx.net> (from Sat, 21 Mar 2020 11:38:26 +0100):> On Thursday, March 19, 2020 8:57:45 AM CET Alexander Leidinger via freebsd- > stable wrote: >> Hi, >> >> if someone wants to donate some FreeBSD based CPU resources to the >> fight against the Corona-virus, here is a quick HOWTO in terms of >> installing the Folding at Home client on FreeBSD: >> >> https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2020/03/19/fighting-the-coronavirus-with-free >> bsd-foldinghome/ >> > > Unfortunately, (using a CPU slot for the same work unit) TPF is 2-3 times > slower than on Ubuntu for me. Much of the speed difference seems to > be related > to libOpenCL. If remove libOpenCL on Ubuntu, it's still 20-30% faster than on > FreeBSD.The pure CPU based code should be the same. Someone would have to trace / reverse engineer what is going on.> Don't know how stable the TPF numbers are, so numbers may be bogus. > > Will a CPU slot also use the GPU with libOpenCL or is it just using better > optimized code? I tried to install libOpenCL but all I get is:No idea. Just an assumption: either full CPU or full GPU.> OpenCL: Not detected: clGetPlatformIDs() returned -1001Depending on what clGetPlatformIDs is doing and if it is not using/requesting some GPU support, it may be worth to check the code of it so see if we can improve something.> Since there's no CUDA support for FreeBSD, I guess there is no point > in trying > getting GPU slots to work.I assume the same. First step would be to get CUDA support in FreeBSD. I think I remember somewhere on the X11 mailinglist someone told that he got some NVidia GPU compute part working... not really sure about that part. It would help to get a big player to request it from NVidia. As Netflix seems to go the "encode videos on CPU" (assumption based upon their Intel av1 codec support/benchmarks) way, and other players in the video / graphics business more oriented towards linux, I do not have much hope in this regard ATM. Bye, Alexander. -- http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander at Leidinger.net: PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF http://www.FreeBSD.org netchild at FreeBSD.org : PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: Digitale PGP-Signatur URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20200321/5f69bb01/attachment.sig>