From: Francesco Pietra (chiendarret_at_gmail.com)
Date: Wed May 30 2012 - 02:45:24 CDT
Norman:
Thanks indeed. Because of the poor economic situation of the country
where I am currently based, for the moment I have to stick to the
consumer board. Possibly only upgrading to the Intel socket LGA2011
board with Core i7-3930K or i7-3960X with 6 physical CPUs and four
memory controllers instead of two for AMD in the board GA-890FXA-UDC5
I have now. That, if more memory bandwidth is needed for GPU higher
that the two GTX-580 I have.
However, are there benchmarks with NAMD (or other MD code) that show
GTX-680 or GTX-690 faster enough than GTX-580 to justify the money?
Thanks
francesco pietra
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Norman Geist
<norman.geist_at_uni-greifswald.de> wrote:
> Hi Francesco,
>
> I just wanted to share what I know about the Radeon cards. As far as I know, they do _NOT_ support CUDA, only OpenCL which can run on both hardware. Namd is written in CUDA so it cannot run with non Nvidia cards. ACML for example is written in OpenCL. There were benchmarks that showed that OpenCL is faster on ATI cards than on Nvidia cards, but still CUDA is faster than OpenCL.
>
> So I think you won't be able to run NAMD on ATI cards.
>
> You are maybe also interested in the machines from FluiDyna that support up to 8 GPU cards.
> Also you will maybe find a motherboard that fits your needs better than this consumer/gamer hardware.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Norman Geist.
>
>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: owner-namd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-namd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] Im
>> Auftrag von Francesco Pietra
>> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 30. Mai 2012 00:00
>> An: Axel Kohlmeyer; NAMD
>> Betreff: Re: namd-l: Three GPU cards on shared-mem motherboard
>>
>> To the extent that a reader may be interested here in consumer
>> mainboards:
>>
>> After much looking around, it came out that consumer mainboards are
>> limited to two real x16 2.0. The 990FXA-GD80, with declared four x16
>> 2.0, is the only exception I was able to find, albeit a suspicious
>> one.
>>
>> Thus, I am inclined to stick at the GA-890FXA-UD5 I have, which
>> performs quite well in MD/CUDA with two GTX-580 (the new Gigabyte that
>> replaces this one is still at two x16 2.0). What I would like to do is
>> replacing the two GTX-580 with faster cards. I can find a good
>> arrangement for that. Unease decision, however, unless someone comes
>> out here with classical molecular dynamics benchmarks for recent GPU
>> cards.
>>
>> From tests for gaming, most often carried out on OpenCL rather than
>> CUDA, the Radeon HD 7970 wins over GTX-580 by a factor of two, and
>> even more on GTX-680 in LuxMark's OpenCL-driven ray-tracing test. In
>> other game tests the difference is modest:
>> http://techreport.com/articles.x/22653/7
>>
>> Even the very expensive GTX-690 is outperformed by Radeon HD 7970 in
>> LuxMark's OpenCL-driven ray-tracing test:
>> http://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php...i.html?start=5.
>>
>> What would be needed at this point is a benchmark for Radeon HD 7970
>> with CUDA/MD.
>>
>> At any event, whether the memory bandwidth of my GA-890FXA-UD5 is
>> enough for two HD 7970, or an Intel socket LGA2011 board is needed
>> with Core i7-3930K or i7-3960X (6 physical CPUs) and four memory
>> controllers instead of two for AMD, is another issue that I am also
>> unable to take.
>>
>> I would be very grateful for comments on these points. Doubling the
>> speed of the simulation (as it occurred when I replaced the GTX-470
>> with GTX-580) is worth the money.
>>
>> francesco pietra
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Axel Kohlmeyer <akohlmey_at_gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Francesco Pietra
>> > <chiendarret_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>> When referring to NAMD, I wanted to imply (badly, I admit)
>> performance
>> >>> boost by the third GPU.
>> >
>> > as i was mentioning before. that is near impossible to predict.
>> >
>> >>> The PCI specification is described by the manufacturer as follows
>> >>>
>> >>> -- PCI Express slots version: 2.0.
>> >>>
>> >>> -- PCI slots: 1.
>> >>>
>> >>> -- PCI express x1 slots: 1.
>> >>>
>> >>> -- PCI express x16 slots: 4.
>> >
>> > that doesn't mean anything. labeling slots as x16
>> > only means that you can stick an x16 wide card
>> > into it. each of these slots can be wired with 16,
>> > 8, 4, 2 or 1 lane. also, some boards claim they
>> > have all 16-lane slots, but then two slots are
>> > connected to a little bridge chip. resulting in
>> > two cards each having to share the bandwidth.
>> >
>> >>> Whether these are real x16 2.x, or not, is beyond my understanding.
>> I
>> >
>> > with out that information, you can't judge.
>> > contact the vendor or find somebody that
>> > has time to research it.
>> >
>> >>> can only compare with the corresponding description for the
>> mainboard
>> >>> I am currently using: GA-890FXA-UD5:
>> >>>
>> >>> 2 x PCI Express x16, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1, PCIEX16_2).
>> >>>
>> >>> 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8).
>> >>>
>> >>> 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4).
>> >>>
>> >>> 2 x PCI Express x1 slots.
>> >>> (All PCI Express slots conform to the PCI Express 2.0)
>> >>>
>> >>> 1 x PCI slot.
>> >>>
>> >>> With this latter mainboard, adding a second GTX-580 gave the
>> expected
>> >>> acceleration. Data for PCIs of the two mainboards being comparable,
>> I
>> >>> would expect that a third GTX-580 on the 990.. motherboard should
>> play
>> >>> well its job. Is it this naive extrapolaion a sound one?
>> >
>> > no. you usually overload the memory bandwidth of the CPU
>> > with the third GPU and thus you won't get the full speedup.
>> > how much speedup you'll get depends on the individual
>> > characteristics of your input.
>> >
>> > axel.
>> >
>> >>>
>> >>> Thanks indeed for further advice
>> >>>
>> >>> francesco pietra
>> >>>
>> > --
>> > Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer
>> > akohlmey_at_gmail.com http://goo.gl/1wk0
>> >
>> > College of Science and Technology
>> > Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA.
>
>
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