david00214 wrote:Ragnar Dan wrote:You UGN SMP+GPU2 folders: how do you make sure the GPU2 client gets enough cycles? Running XP makes it tricky.
I may have to upgrade to Vista to make it work without doing anything special. Both are running as services, which means the SYSTEM account owns them, so you can't modify the priority or affinity without using software like
Sysinternals Process Explorer that ignores the permissions that Task Manager follows. For now, lowering the priority of VMware so it allows a few for the GPU helps, but it's still not enough to make the
GPU2 client run at full speed. Its priority and affinity have to be modified for every WU to get it close to that level of performance.
Actually with Vista I don't have to worry about the GPU2 clients getting cycles. My SMP clients are on cores 0,1 and 2,3. My GPU2 clients are spread over all 4 cores.
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I don't have XP on a folding rig anymore so I can't really say which OS is better overall.
Only XP users' input is likely to be useful; you Vista types can cram it. Besides, installing Vista is the easy route, but that's money for no real reason. Whereas I could pretend the video card was for a real reason I've not yet determined.
Flying Fox: My problem, as already explained, isn't with the VMware stuff. I can set it to run at lower priority with no trouble, and it even allows that in its console under Host->Settings where its Priority tab has "Input grabbed" and "Input ungrabbed" boxes allowing the choice between normal and low priority, as you indicate. That is not the problem. It's how do XP users get any useful production out of GPU2 clients running on cards which are also driving their displays if they're also running at least one SMP client using all cores. Affinity has nothing to do with the VMware setup here, since it requires at least 2 cores, and that's all the machine has. The question to answer is how to allow at least one of them to be available for the GPU2's FahCore_11.exe process at any time, which means correcting the bug in
[email protected] that fails to respect the configuration choice to "Disable CPU affinity lock", which leaves a line saying "nocpulock=1" in the client.cfg. The client is now almost 3 months old, yet no bug fix.
So far there's no way to do all those things at once in XP that I've seen without using additional software. I could probably, after a fair amount of research, cobble together something to watch for the process by name and once every n minutes make sure it's got the proper affinity & priority to run at full speed (it could be made more efficient than that, but it likely would take at most a few milliseconds of CPU time per minute anyway). There's also a utility that I found which may do most of the work (a console application which allows the settings, though I haven't tested it yet. The rest can be done by calling it as a scheduled task every 10 minutes or some such). That still leaves out the ability to quickly change it back, but that's just a shortcut or batch file to call the utility with the proper parameters.
The System account is the only way I'm aware of that allows the service to run without the user being logged in. Back in 2007 when I started running the Linux SMP client under VMware I tried running it as a user and it will not start until that user is logged in. That's a major reason why I and others use it. If one sets things up properly, all anyone need do is turn the machine on and it's folding at full speed. Even a young child can do that.