Getting the PPSieve WUs to run on ATI cards

Ok. Just figured this one out, so I'm posting a how-to for you folks with ATI cards on how to get this subproject to run (which will be helpful for the final PG challenge...). Before you attempt any of this, make sure you have closed BOINC (and this is intended for Windows systems):

1. MAKE SURE YOUR ATI DRIVER HAS OPENCL SUPPORT!!! I was consistently getting errors, and an LAF member on the PG boards pointed out to me that the driver I was using didn't have OpenCL support. Once I upgraded, everything was fine. I'm using driver 10.10, which has OpenCL support. 10.7 does not, 10.11 (oddly) does not. Before installing/upgrading drivers, make sure you have this support. [Note: MW, DNETC, and Collatz were not written in OpenCL, so they don't run into this problem.]
2. Download this executable file (it's safe) from the PG website and save it to your desktop.
3. Navigate to your BOINC Data Directory, projects folder, PG folder. Drop the executable from step 2 in there.
4. Open Notepad.
5. Paste this (thank you .Steve/Paladin/Poorboy for posting this) into Notepad and save it to the same folder as in Step 3 with the file name "app_info.xml":

Code:

---

<app_info>
<app>
<name>pps_sr2sieve</name>
<user_friendly_name>Proth Prime Search (Sieve)</user_friendly_name>
</app>
<file_info>
<name>primegrid_tpsieve_1.35_windows_intelx86__ati13ati.exe</name>
<executable/>
</file_info>
<app_version>
<app_name>pps_sr2sieve</app_name>
<version_num>135</version_num>
<plan_class>ati13ati</plan_class>
<avg_ncpus>0.05</avg_ncpus>
<max_ncpus>1</max_ncpus>
<flops>1.0e11</flops>
<coproc>
<type>ATI</type>
<count>1</count>
</coproc>
<cmdline></cmdline>
<file_ref>
<file_name>primegrid_tpsieve_1.35_windows_intelx86__ati13ati.exe</file_name>
<main_program/>
</file_ref>
</app_version>
</app_info>

---

6. Make sure your PG preferences allow ATI WUs to be downloaded.
7. Restart BOINC.

Should work...

A couple have validated now...

1800 credits each. ~1800s on the 5970 at 725MHz, ~1300s at 850MHz.

Thank you Maxwell for the info.

Now just need work as PG's server tells me.....
11/24/2010 4:10:25 AM PrimeGrid Requesting new tasks for GPU
11/24/2010 4:10:50 AM PrimeGrid Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
11/24/2010 4:10:50 AM PrimeGrid Message from server: No work sent
11/24/2010 4:10:50 AM PrimeGrid Message from server: No work is available for Proth Prime Search (Sieve)
11/24/2010 4:10:50 AM PrimeGrid Message from server: _("No work available for the applications you have selected. Please check your project preferences on the web site.")

Ok. Got this to work also.

After doing the above steps, I instantly got 21 GPU tasks.

So I am back on my fav. project...PG....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fire$torm

Now just need work as PG's server tells me.....

---

I haven't had trouble getting work since I got the ATI app... BOINC is reading the app_info file, yes? And you have ATI work selected on the PG site, right? (Forehead-smack questions first... ;) )

Whoops! Redundant post. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by trigggl

Whoops! Redundant post. Nothing to see here. Move along.

---

These aren't the droids your looking for.........

Question: Has anyone tried running two wu's concurrently like you can with MW?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fire$torm

Question: Has anyone tried running two wu's concurrently like you can with MW?

---

I haven't, but people have. It's not too useful because the WUs are much longer. If you're interested, change "count" to .5 in the app_info file above...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maxwell

I haven't, but people have. It's not too useful because the WUs are much longer. If you're interested, change "count" to .5 in the app_info file above...

---

Yeah, I did that about ten minutes after I posted the question. so far no "crash n' burn" :P I did notice that one wu crunches slower than the other but any increase in production is good!
BTW: My two nVidia cards cranked out more credits than the rest of my mini farm combined. Yes, yes, I know. Apples n' Oranges......

Thank Max I'm crunching away now. I'm finding that it take my 5870 about 21 minutes and my 4870 about 43 minutes to complete a WU. How is everyone else making out? Also do I need to bump up the memory for these or leave them low like Milk?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mike029

Thank Max I'm crunching away now. I'm finding that it take my 5870 about 21 minutes and my 4870 about 43 minutes to complete a WU. How is everyone else making out? Also do I need to bump up the memory for these or leave them low like Milk?

---

Leave 'em low. And, since it's a less efficient app (running ~80% load), you can probably OC your cards higher for PG...

I also noticed that my 4850 runs much cooler crunching PG than it does with MW. For now though I have put my ATI back on MW. I won't abandon that fight \m/ PG has replaced DNETC on my nVidia cards.

Thanks again Maxwell for the info. Good work.

Looks like it favours Nvidia/Cuda.....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Beerdrinker

Looks like it favours Nvidia/Cuda.....

---

Without a doubt, great credit for CUDA, not the best for ATI. Also from what I'm seeing the ATI app needs around 12% CPU compared to less than 1% for CUDA, this will cut into your CPU projects. :(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DrBob

Without a doubt, great credit for CUDA, not the best for ATI. Also from what I'm seeing the ATI app needs around 12% CPU compared to less than 1% for CUDA, this will cut into your CPU projects. :(

---

Agreed. But for 3 days, I'll run it...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maxwell

Agreed. But for 3 days, I'll run it...

---

Yep! I'll upgrade to CAT 10.10 when I get home from Hawaii and get the cards setup :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bryan

Yep! I'll upgrade to CAT 10.10 when I get home from Hawaii and get the cards setup :D

---

Sounds great Bryan...

I am actually thinking about getting myself a cheap CUDA card, since PG is one of my all time favourites.....But X-mas is just around the corner and lots to spend money this month.....

Argh....Desicions desicions....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Beerdrinker

Sounds great Bryan...

I am actually thinking about getting myself a cheap CUDA card, since PG is one of my all time favourites.....But X-mas is just around the corner and lots to spend money this month.....

Argh....Desicions desicions....

---

You could just put the card on your wife's hint list for your x-mas present *-:)

It seems that even with the temporary credit increase that the other ATI projects still pay better, for nVidia cards this is the motherload until they adjust the credits again. My pair of 275's was getting about 90k a day on GPUGrid, now getting over 300k a day.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shadowlurker

It seems that even with the temporary credit increase that the other ATI projects still pay better, for nVidia cards this is the motherload until they adjust the credits again. My pair of 275's was getting about 90k a day on GPUGrid, now getting over 300k a day.

---

I have a 9800GT and it got 50K yesterday. The best I could do before that was 20K at dnetc. A former team mate gave me the card. Of course if your ATI is doing better than that, there's no reason to get one unless you have an open slot somewhere. Maybe it will help some team mates to invest if they find out that one of these cheapos can help them that much. It takes me 57 min to complete a task.

EDIT: It's sad when I can read my own post and have trouble figuring out the relevance and what it is I'm trying to say.

I finally got it to work! I tried installing 10.10, no good. Then I tried removing all the ATI driver stuff, rebooting, then running driver cleaner, then installing 10.10. All FAIL. Maybe because I had two 5870s? No idea. So I did some more reading on the PG forum. Someone suggested 10.11 APP (there are two versions, get the APP one). Ding! Crunching away!

Edit: Some credit comparisons. Numbers are credits/hour:

Win 7 Dual 5870:
DNETC - 24784 (single task uses both GPUs)
PG - 14050 (7025 per card); 57% of DNETC

XP64 single 5870:
DNETC - 13539
PG - 8031; 59% of DNETC

XP46 single 4870
DNETC - 4515
PG - 3172*; 70% of DNETC
*Only one task returned at the time

So it looks like there is less of a loss in credits with the 4870 than with the 5870. But either way, it is a drop compared to DNETC.

Still, this is going to be SWEET for the next challenge!

Has anyone tried running both ATI and CPU tasks? I would like to run othe subprojects on the CPU and PPS Sieve on the GPU. Just wondering if it would work. The only problem would be keeping the app_info up to date every time a cpu app gets updated.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Teratoma

Has anyone tried running both ATI and CPU tasks? I would like to run othe subprojects on the CPU and PPS Sieve on the GPU. Just wondering if it would work. The only problem would be keeping the app_info up to date every time a cpu app gets updated.

---

I have not, but that's one of my projects. I'll post when I get it done. ;)

I will be back to read this--got new lappy and have it on Primegrid. It says it has ATI Radeon graphics, so.........:)

I've been reading this thread and the one on BOINC GPU compatibility and have not had any luck getting my ATI HD 4650 card to work. I've tried it on Collatz and PG using 10.10, 10.11, the regular driver and the APP driver. I also tried the steps listed in post one of this thread. Not sure what to do next.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Groundhog@SETI.USA

I've been reading this thread and the one on BOINC GPU compatibility and have not had any luck getting my ATI HD 4650 card to work. I've tried it on Collatz and PG using 10.10, 10.11, the regular driver and the APP driver. I also tried the steps listed in post one of this thread. Not sure what to do next.

---

Since I can't find it on short notice, can you point to the thread where you're discussing this? What error messages are you seeing?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Groundhog@SETI.USA

I've been reading this thread and the one on BOINC GPU compatibility and have not had any luck getting my ATI HD 4650 card to work. I've tried it on Collatz and PG using 10.10, 10.11, the regular driver and the APP driver. I also tried the steps listed in post one of this thread. Not sure what to do next.

---

Sorry to hear that GH. I have had issues trying to get my 4850 to crunch Collatz in that I had a hard time getting work form the project server. Sometimes it would take HOURS before I would get anything.
Anyhow, try crunching DNETC with your card since it is not a finicky project. If you can crunch that then you should be able to crunch PG & Collatz.

When I set my 5870 up to crunch PG it did not immediately start downloading units, but I was no longer getting error messages so I just left it overnight and at some point it started grabbing WU's.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shadowlurker

When I set my 5870 up to crunch PG it did not immediately start downloading units, but I was no longer getting error messages so I just left it overnight and at some point it started grabbing WU's.

---

Ahhh. I see you've discovered some of the problems with the BOINC scheduler. Sneaky little devils to find and fix. From the latest posts to the boinc email lists, you will be sorry to hear that they still aren't fixed in the most recent 6.12.x version. As they make the BOINC scheduler "smarter" it makes more and more mistakes and makes it more difficult to find and fix the problems. Some people will never admit that K.I.S.S. works.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maxwell

Since I can't find it on short notice, can you point to the thread where you're discussing this? What error messages are you seeing?

---

Here is the GPU thread.

When I try to run PG, I get "Unrecoverable error for result pps_xxx ( - exit code - 150 0xffff6a))"

When I try to run Collatz, I think the exit code was ( 1 ). Both error off with computation errors. I haven't tried any other projects. I wonder if the Sapphire brand card may have some differences that cause the errors.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Groundhog@SETI.USA

Here is the GPU thread.

When I try to run PG, I get "Unrecoverable error for result pps_xxx ( - exit code - 150 0xffff6a))"

When I try to run Collatz, I think the exit code was ( 1 ). Both error off with computation errors. I haven't tried any other projects. I wonder if the Sapphire brand card may have some differences that cause the errors.

---

All my cards are Sapphire... I have had no issues with them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr. Hankey

All my cards are Sapphire... I have had no issues with them.

---

I don't know then. I guess it's a problem with the drivers. I got the 10.10 and 10.11 from the ATI (AMD) site. I'm running Win 7 32bit. Oh well. I'd like to get this working before the PG challenge on the 18th.

Well I upgraded to CAT 10.11 and I am still getting errors. It looks like it is a WU issue only affecting ATI cards. See this PG post here:

http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=2867#28807

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr. Hankey

Well I upgraded to CAT 10.11 and I am still getting errors. It looks like it is a WU issue only affecting ATI cards. See this PG post here:

http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=2867#28807

---

Thanks for the link. So the real problem are broken wu's. Unfortunately the project managers do not wish to flush their cache instead insisting that crunchers muddle through the bad sh_t until everything gets processed by capable (read nVidia) cards.
I would suggest just not running that project until they fix the problem.

I followed Max's outline and all the problems I was having ended. After seeing all the problems I've restarted pg to see if it still works. I've been running it for 2 days now without any issue. I'm running 2 cards in one box. Asus HD 4870 and Sapphire 5870 using Vista Ultimate 64. The 4870 takes over 40 mins. to complete a wu and the 5870 takes about 18 mins. to finish. I'm at work now but will post my drivers and the xml file later today. I hope it helps.

Well, I never have gotten PG working so I tried DNETC. That works ok. Maybe when the reported bad WUs flush out at PG I'll have better luck.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr. Hankey

Well I upgraded to CAT 10.11 and I am still getting errors. It looks like it is a WU issue only affecting ATI cards. See this PG post here:

http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=2867#28807

---

You tried the APP versions of CAT? Just double checking...

OK. Maybe this will help someone else out there...

I just received a brand new 5770 and installed it.
I was receiving error -150's on all my ATI GPU WU's.

Code:

---

<message>
 - exit code -150 (0xffffff6a)
</message>
<stderr_txt>
Sieve started: 3259927000000000 <= p < 3259930000000000
Thread 0 starting
Detected 160 multiprocessors (800 SPUs) on device 0.
Error: Building Program (clBuildProgram): Program build failure
Catastrophic error: cannot open source file "C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\OCLB.tmp.cl": not
          a regular file

1 catastrophic error detected in the compilation of "C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\OCLB.tmp.cl".
Compilation terminated.

21:16:02 (3612): called boinc_finish

---

Turns out the problem was permissions on the C:\Windows\Temp folder. By default, the system wasn't allowing the boinc_project user to write the temporary program into the folder to compile it for the GPU. At a Command prompt as an admin, I simply did a:

Code:

---

cacls C:\Windows\Temp /E /T /G boinc_project:F
cacls C:\Windows\Temp /E /T /G boinc_master:F

---

And the WU's are now running successfully.

This is on a Windows XP, 64 Bit system with Catalyst 10.10 with the OpenCL SDK installed. (Note: I also had to run the "Custom" Install rather than "Express," even though I downloaded the full package with the OpenCL components. "Express" chose not to install them.)

Those permissions are a little loose, but in the temp folder, that shouldn't be much of a risk.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mumps

OK. Maybe this will help someone else out there...

I just received a brand new 5770 and installed it.
I was receiving error -150's on all my ATI GPU WU's.

Code:

---

<message>
 - exit code -150 (0xffffff6a)
</message>
<stderr_txt>
Sieve started: 3259927000000000 <= p < 3259930000000000
Thread 0 starting
Detected 160 multiprocessors (800 SPUs) on device 0.
Error: Building Program (clBuildProgram): Program build failure
Catastrophic error: cannot open source file "C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\OCLB.tmp.cl": not
          a regular file

1 catastrophic error detected in the compilation of "C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\OCLB.tmp.cl".
Compilation terminated.

21:16:02 (3612): called boinc_finish

---

Turns out the problem was permissions on the C:\Windows\Temp folder. By default, the system wasn't allowing the boinc_project user to write the temporary program into the folder to compile it for the GPU. At a Command prompt as an admin, I simply did a:

Code:

---

cacls C:\Windows\Temp /E /T /G boinc_project:F
cacls C:\Windows\Temp /E /T /G boinc_master:F

---

And the WU's are now running successfully.

This is on a Windows XP, 64 Bit system with Catalyst 10.10 with the OpenCL SDK installed. (Note: I also had to run the "Custom" Install rather than "Express," even though I downloaded the full package with the OpenCL components. "Express" chose not to install them.)

Those permissions are a little loose, but in the temp folder, that shouldn't be much of a risk.

---

Wow, that may be just what I've been looking for. I'm running Win 7 32bit. I get the same exit - 150 but not the detail about what file and directory is the problem. How do you open a "CMD" window as admin? I get a message "No mapping between account names and security IDs was done."

The Boinc message says "[sched_op_debug] Reason: Unrecoverable error for result pps_sr2sieve_5106245_2 (exit code - 150 (0xffffff6a))"

Perhaps you could find out what is needed for Collatz also. I suspect the same kind of problem.

Thanks a lot.