What can I do with this PC?
 

Santa came around early this year and brought me a shiny new [URL="http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c03306320&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0004"]HP Pavilion HPE h9-1185 Phoenix[/URL] box, and there's some things I'd like to ask here regarding how I might get it to contribute to GIMPS.

The first question is this: This machine has an Intel Z75 chipset as well as a Core i7 3770 CPU. If [URL="http://ark.intel.com/products/65719/Intel-Core-i7-3770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz"]my research[/URL] is [URL="http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/z75-z77-express-chipset-brief.pdf"]correct[/URL], both of these elements support the Flexible Display Interface (FDI), which means that the system can run both the integrated graphics [B]and[/B] the discrete GPU (AMD Radeon HD 7770) at the same time. So... can I run separate factoring programs (or different instances of the same program) on the onboard GPU and the add-on graphics card?

I have more questions, but I'd like to start with this one.

Rodrigo

[QUOTE=Rodrigo;316985]Santa came around early this year and brought me a shiny new [URL="http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c03306320&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0004"]HP Pavilion HPE h9-1185 Phoenix[/URL] box, and there's some things I'd like to ask here regarding how I might get it to contribute to GIMPS.

The first question is this: This machine has an Intel Z75 chipset as well as a Core i7 3770 CPU. If [URL="http://ark.intel.com/products/65719/Intel-Core-i7-3770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz"]my research[/URL] is [URL="http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/z75-z77-express-chipset-brief.pdf"]correct[/URL], both of these elements support the Flexible Display Interface (FDI), which means that the system can run both the integrated graphics [B]and[/B] the discrete GPU (AMD Radeon HD 7770) at the same time. So... can I run separate factoring programs (or different instances of the same program) on the onboard GPU and the add-on graphics card?

I have more questions, but I'd like to start with this one.

Rodrigo[/QUOTE]

I have a integrated AMD APU and a HD 7770, can run both at same time.. but I am not sure if mfakto supports Ivy Bridge iGPU's yet..

Thanks, that's good to know. Hopefully it's not too big an assumption to make, that one could do the same thing with Ivy Bridge as you're doing with the AMD APU.

Even if it's not (yet) possible to run mfakto on the iGPU, I wonder if one can run, say, CUDALucas on it while the HD7770 is running mfakto.

The next question would be -- if you run mfakt_ on a graphics card, how much does that impact your ability to run programs, surf the Web, watch videos and the like? Ultimately, this new PC would be an everyday computer (otherwise Santa wouldn't have delivered it :smile: ).

Rodrigo

CudaLucas relies on cufft library, provided by nvidia and dedicated to their cards/gpus. To run CL on (AMD/intel/etc) someone has to rewrite that library (which is a hell of work and need knowledge behind what we mortals have). Sooner we would see CL running on AMD than intel, there are already trials to implement FFT on AMD gpus.

To expand on what LaurV said, CUDA applications like mfaktc and CUDALucas can only run on CUDA-enabled graphics cards, which are only sold by nVidia, because they're the ones who made CUDA. mfakto is written to use OpenCL, an open Computing standard for graphics cards. (OpenGL is the corresponding open Graphics standard.) Intel and AMD graphics chips support OpenCL (as does nVidia*), and thus mfakto will run on them. In order to implement "OpenCLLucas" in OpenCL, somebody will have to, like LaurV said, implement an FFT library in OpenCL.

PS I'm pretty sure that the IB iGPUs support OpenCL 1.2; it's worth a shot to try running mfakto on the IB iGPU.

*I've asked Bdot about running mfakto on nVidia cards before, but as can be seem somewhere in the mfakto thread, nVidia's OpenCL compilers are buggy, and mfakto won't run; mfaktc would probably be faster anyways.

Thanks @LaurV and @Dubslow.

So, if I understand it, it might be possible to run mfakto on the HD 7770 and (separately) on the Intel iGP. The question then becomes -- given that the add-on graphics card is in place, how to enable the iGP without disabling the add-on card?

Rodrigo

If you are talking about the BIOS settings for video, that usually only applies at boot up, that is, which GPU will show boot progress. I have an onboard GPU, though I've never tried to run mfakto on it. I did, at one point, use it for the display while running mfaktc on an add-on card.

For me, I just did "Enable crossfire support" or something like that in the bios :smile:

So then, how would one assign the onboard GPU to do one thing and the add-on card to do a different thing? Is there a setting in mfakto to accomplish that?

Rodrigo

[QUOTE=Rodrigo;317319]So then, how would one assign the onboard GPU to do one thing and the add-on card to do a different thing? Is there a setting in mfakto to accomplish that?

Rodrigo[/QUOTE]

Yes, the argument -d

for me, it is -d 11 and -d 12,

[QUOTE=kracker;317321]Yes, the argument -d

for me, it is -d 11 and -d 12,[/QUOTE]

Huh, interesting. How does one find out which numbers to input there?

Another issue: If you do run mfakto (or whatever) on both the iGP and the discrete GPU, is there any processing capability left over to run, say, videos or Windows Media Center?

Rodrigo