Applications and computing devices overview
Bernd Machenschalk
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15 Jan 2025 12:20:14 UTC
Topic 231974
(moderation:
I wrote this as a rely in "Heads-up: BRP4 might run briefly out of work", but it's somewhat hidden there and might be of more general interest.
O3AS is our current Gravitational Wave search, the main purpose of the project and we try to direct as much computing power as possible to it. However, it requires the most computation, so that it's hardly feasible even for modern fast CPUs; so it's GPU only (NVidia&AMD).
BRP7 (Radio Pulsars in Meerkat data) also requires a lot of computation, so we're trying to utilize the GPUs for it that can't run O3AS. Besides AMD & NVidia, we're trying to use the Intel GPUs that do (still) have double precision support, although the distinction doesn't seem to work perfectly (yet). Sorry if you have to manually disable it on your Intel GPU because it doesn't work.
FGRPB1G (Gamma-Ray pulsars in binary systems) is computationally similar to BRP7, but we currently don't have scientifically interesting and sufficiently promising targets for that search, so it is currently on hold.
FGRP5 (isolated Gamma-Ray pulsars) is well suited for modern CPUs, Intel and fast ARM64 (including Apple Silicon).
BRP4 (Radio Pulsars in data from various observatories) is our least demanding search in terms of memory, disk space, computing power etc, so we have application versions for all low-profile devices - Android mobile devices, PowerPC Macs, Raspberry Pi and also for the GPUs that lack double precision capability.
BRP4A is the application that we currently use to test Apple Silicon versions (CPU & Metal GPU). It is split out from BRP4 mainly to have finer control over the validation.
When we do have some BRP4 analysis that requires more urgency than the low profile devices can deliver, we put it into the BRP4G pipeline. In that the workunits are actually bundles of multiple (4-16) single BRP4 tasks, because single BRP4 tasks would run too fast on the devices we run these on (currently fast CPUs) and flood our DB with requests. Currently, though, we don't have such urgency, and the BRP4G pipeline is suspended.
This is our policy regarding "official" applications and versions. Of course with anonymous platform apps you can do what you want and bypass that as you like. As long as the number of people doing this is small enough to not endanger the whole system, this is OK for us and welcome. But bear in mind that we have the policy above for good reason.
BM
FYI, the new, and likely
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FYI, the new, and likely future, Intel discrete GPUs (not CPU integrated) in their "B" series do support hardware FP64 now. where the previous "A" series cards lacked this feature. That was a sticking point for their participation in BRP7
they would be fairly well suited for both O3AS and BRP7 IMO and they do crunch BRP7 on the included intel GPU app that exists on Windows. The computation ability on in the ball park of other cards like Nvidia RTX 3060Ti, RTX 2080, or AMD RX 6700, etc. but the user has to make some customizations with their coproc_info.xml file to trick the scheduler into giving work.
The problem is that the Scheduler still has some name format requirement for Intel GPUs where the listed name has to match some specific string like "HD Graphics [999]" or whatever and the scheduler wont send them work. can this be adjusted?
this error from the scheduler:
I know with BRP7, you mentioned that the Intel OpenCL binary is exactly the same as the AMD one. could this be the case for the O3AS application as well to support these Intel GPUs?
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