Putting it all together?

[lavalamp]

How about BD FALATTIR? Benevolent Dictator For As Long As The Thread Is Relevant. I'm not sure why the role needs a name though.

Perhaps this would be some good stuff to put on the Mersenne wiki too (although it seems not to be working currently).

[Karl M Johnson]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

the recent top end dual GPU ATI cards (Radeon HD 6990) blow way past this limit and violate the ATX specification. More cards may continue this trend in future.

I hope not!
Unless they'll try to do it again with 28nm fab.

One thing you forgot, btw - PCI-E 1.x slot supplies the card with at most 75W of additional power. PCI-E 2.x slot grants 150W of power. So, at most, it's 150 * 3 = 450W of power.

[Rodrigo]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

Perhaps this would be some good stuff to put on the Mersenne wiki too (although it seems not to be working currently).

lavalamp,

Actually this (putting it on the wiki) is what I had in mind originally, but if it'll work as a series of posts in a sticky thread, that's fine too (so long as the thread can be kept short!).

It will help to define what we want to do, or how. Christenson wrote of the person in charge (czar, enforcer, BD FALATTIR) "killing all the posts that get in the way of the beginner figuring out what to do." That seems to suggest going through the threads and distilling the information.

I, on the other hand, was at first thinking in terms of "commissioning" a series of related articles written for the wiki, aimed at helping a non-technical person to get up and running. But it could work either way. I'd just like to know what it is that we'll be asking for.

Which approach would work better? Maybe even a hybrid approach, like articles in a sticky.

Ideas?

Rodrigo

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Rodrigo

Actually this (putting it on the wiki) is what I had in mind originally, but if it'll work as a series of posts in a sticky thread, that's fine too (so long as the thread can be kept short!).

Do both.

[diep]

Originally Posted by Karl M Johnson

I hope not!
Unless they'll try to do it again with 28nm fab.

One thing you forgot, btw - PCI-E 1.x slot supplies the card with at most 75W of additional power. PCI-E 2.x slot grants 150W of power. So, at most, it's 150 * 3 = 450W of power.

As long as people are buying it, and they are, they will go even further at 22 nm. They skip 28 nm AFAIK.

The big problem is that most games are so sensitive to bandwidth to the RAM. So they want to give the gpu's inside a bigger bandwidth. At the time IBM was busy designing CELL, a year or 10 ago, there was already many engineers doubting ibm would achieve the internal bandwidth for CELL.

Now that lousy two dozen gigabytes per second is a peanut compared to the internal terabyte bandwidth that the AMD cards have to the shared caches, not to mention the 32 Terabyte per second to the register files that the 6990 delivers internal.

So the internal caches seem to have been solved quite a lot, yet the bandwidth to the RAM of a lousy 170-190 GB/s per gpu is peanuts compared to that internal bandwidth, so it's all about that bottleneck. That'll consume a lot of power from the gpu's themselves, as i guess they don't want to put onboard a lot of SRAM, no matter how happy we would be for prime number crunching with more SRAM.

[Brain]

Originally Posted by TheJudger

Hi Brain,
A small correction: compute capability 1.0 does not work for mfaktc.
It is save to remove the "possible but slow (too few registers)" for cc 1.1 from your paper. With default settings a cc 1.1 capable GPU is not that bad, e.g. a GTX 9800 is still much faster than CPU only TF.

Done. See attachment.

[Christenson]

Originally Posted by Rodrigo

lavalamp,

Actually this (putting it on the wiki) is what I had in mind originally, but if it'll work as a series of posts in a sticky thread, that's fine too (so long as the thread can be kept short!).

It will help to define what we want to do, or how.
<snip>
Ideas?

Rodrigo

Rodrigo:
The fundamental task of the "Don", or editor, is to remove all the information that gets in the way of a beginner getting started. It's not important whether you cut down posts or add up paragraphs in a Wiki, or do both. However, mfaktc (and probably CudaLucas) is putting out new revisions on a regular basis, and the pointer to the latest needs to work, and be found easily, even for those of us that have done it before! Thus it is that I thought a sticky thread would work.

[Rodrigo]

I came back from vacation to find an enormous project waiting for me in the inbox.

I'm estimating it'll take me till mid-July to complete. However, I do want to pursue this sticky-wiki idea. As I became more aware of the immense potential for GPU computing to contribute to GIMPS, I had two contradictory reactions:

1. I realized how puny in comparison would become the contributions by those of us who use regular CPUs. Why purchase a top-of-the line, six-core Intel Core i7-990X (I was enjoying the shopping) when a good graphics card can wipe the floor with the 990X? Not to mention my (ahem) older PCs with Pentiums I and II. So my initial reaction was to feel deflated by the advent of GPU factoring.

2. The very next thought was -- wait a minute, I can get me one of those thingies and join in the fun!

So one thing led to another, I saw that I wasn't nearly knowledgeable enough to get a video card to start crunching numbers, and here we are.

Time will be at a premium for a few weeks, but I definitely intend to jump on this -- for my own sake as well as that of any folks out there who are contemplating exploring this corner of the factoring universe.

I'm not sure that I know enough to make a proper selection of posts in the relevant threads. Check that -- I'm sure that I do not know enough! If I were in charge, I'd ask someone who does know to do it. For the wiki, what I have in mind is to write a chatty sort of introduction written from the viewpoint of a beginner such as myself, and prepare a skeleton (outline) of the various steps and requirements, then ask experts to fill in the details (and, probably, to add limbs as we go along).

How's this sound?

Rodrigo

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Rodrigo

If I were in charge, I'd ask someone who does know to do it. For the wiki, what I have in mind is to write a chatty sort of introduction written from the viewpoint of a beginner such as myself, and prepare a skeleton (outline) of the various steps and requirements, then ask experts to fill in the details (and, probably, to add limbs as we go along).

How's this sound?

Sounds like a good sales pitch to me.

You've got the job.

Paul

[Christenson]

Posts 632 and 658 in the Trial Division by mfaktc have the cudart DLL's needed for Windows.

http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpos...&postcount=632

[Rodrigo]

Originally Posted by Christenson

Posts 632 and 658 in the Trial Division by mfaktc have the cudart DLL's needed for Windows.

http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpos...&postcount=632

Great find, Christenson! That's a mighty big haystack you got these needles from.

I can't wait to get going on this project...

Rodrigo