I've had to stop crunching for GPU Grid on the GT240's I've got because since the new app,my dual machine keeps freezing even when cards are at stock and I get stuttery video on another computer. Before anyone suggests it's not this projects apps I have tested it with and without. One will still run for a while because it's remote but it too will be detached.
It's all well and good squeezing every ounce out of these cards but please remember they also have other tasks to perform which, I think is sometimes forgotten especially as they don't have the low priority capability of the CPU.

SORRY!
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I also had to pull my GT240 since it did not like the new WU's at all. It went from about 20 hrs to several days. I do not think it had the power to run GPUgrid any more.

Yes, it's a shame that such good, not really old, cards get abandoned by the project in it's addiction to only the latest, most expensive, cards running 24/7.

They don't care about ordinary crunchers, they only want people with very much money to spend.
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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

I'm going to have to drop this one, too. My Nvidia cards are all 9600/9800/8800 cards and GPUgrid WU's either error out, take days to finish with no credit given or the machine simply won't get any.

I also think it's a shame that my mostly recycled crunchers, machines I brought back to life to put to work for science, aren't desirable. I'm not about to put together $2000 machines to satisfy the requirements of a couple of projects that seem more interested in playing with bleeding edge equipment than doing anything resembling real science.
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Jeff Gu

Sometimes real (bleeding edge) science requires bleeding edge equipment to get answers while the science is still - well, bleeding edge.

Having said that, my 9800GT and 9800GTX+ cards are (mostly) finishing tasks - except the new 'Fatty' WUs - within 24 hours, without error, provided I abort the *-KASHIF_HIVPR_n1_(un)bound_* sub-class of tasks: that's the only group I'm still having trouble with.

As was suggested to me by skgiven, you could roll back to the 197.45 drivers, so that you get the older 6.12 app running under cuda 3.0. I have done this on one machine and it seems to have resolved the reliability issues I was having.

Cuda 3.1 + the 6.13 app are not stable together (under windows).

I understand if you need a later cuda version for some other project, so this may not be the answer for you.

Cheers

I periodically check back on this project to see if there has been any progress resolving work unit failure issues on mid range cards (I still have a few 9800GT's running). The answer, sadly, is that things are worse. Just had a batch error out after running anywhere from 3 to 14 hours -- the deadly error while computing result.

GPUGrid (for me) has a number of problems.

1) Relatively low credits for GPU cycles (compared to nearly any other CUDA supporting project).

2) VERY long run times - which increase the possibility of 'error while computing'.

3) Bad citizenship regarding erroring work units, that is, unlike other projects where the work units either error out early or 'pre-abort', GPUGrid workunits are perfectly content sucking up GPU cycles for hours before failing thus wasting cycles.

4) Over time, the GPU requirements have grown, making any but quite expensive quite high power CUDA cards increasingly marginal. Further, the long run/fail scenario has gotten worse rather than better over time.

5) The continued non-support for ATI GPU cards. As ATI GPU cards have been getting better and more efficient, as for a double precision lower cost and relatively lower power card, the 4850 is quite attractive, the lack of support from GPUGrid increasingly marginalizes the project.

Given all this, for me, I've elected to detatch the 9800 based workstations I have from GPUGrid, instead, they will focus of Collatz, DNetc, and to a lesser degree Einstein and SETI as NONE of those projects are plagued by the long run, error while computing problems seen so frequently here.

Sometimes real (bleeding edge) science requires bleeding edge equipment to get answers while the science is still - well, bleeding edge.

Having said that, my 9800GT and 9800GTX+ cards are (mostly) finishing tasks - except the new 'Fatty' WUs - within 24 hours, without error, provided I abort the *-KASHIF_HIVPR_n1_(un)bound_* sub-class of tasks: that's the only group I'm still having trouble with.

For Linux users you can use the GT 240 with the latest NVIDIA drivers. There was a problem with the Cairo 2D libraries that caused X.Org to chew a lot of CPU but that's resolved in the latest version.

Run times for the 6.13 app increased about 50-75% over 6.12 so I don't get the 24 hour bonus but I do make it within the 48 hour window. At least the workunits don't fail like they did before.

For those interested, my configuration is:

Fedora 14 x86_64 (all current updates)
NVIDIA Driver 260.19.29
CUDA 3.2 Toolkit

I periodically check back on this project to see if there has been any progress resolving work unit failure issues on mid range cards (I still have a few 9800GT's running). The answer, sadly, is that things are worse. Just had a batch error out after running anywhere from 3 to 14 hours -- the deadly error while computing result.

GPUGrid (for me) has a number of problems.

1) Relatively low credits for GPU cycles (compared to nearly any other CUDA supporting project).

2) VERY long run times - which increase the possibility of 'error while computing'.

3) Bad citizenship regarding erroring work units, that is, unlike other projects where the work units either error out early or 'pre-abort', GPUGrid workunits are perfectly content sucking up GPU cycles for hours before failing thus wasting cycles.

4) Over time, the GPU requirements have grown, making any but quite expensive quite high power CUDA cards increasingly marginal. Further, the long run/fail scenario has gotten worse rather than better over time.

5) The continued non-support for ATI GPU cards. As ATI GPU cards have been getting better and more efficient, as for a double precision lower cost and relatively lower power card, the 4850 is quite attractive, the lack of support from GPUGrid increasingly marginalizes the project.

These guys program in CUDA, this is their expertise.

Things are good and will get better.

Hello Saenger,
Checkout Bigtuna
He's running Linux with a 240 and averaging less than a day/task at stock, with no SWAN_SYNC. Might be worth a PM to find out what his set up is.

My machine finished the first WU under non-babysitting conditions, so like the projects has to expect it's users to set their machines, except that it's running an unusual 24/7:

As I have no way to choose any application, it's the project peoples choice alone to send me Fermi apps for my non-Fermi card. I can't do anything to choose 6.12, I can only install the newest drivers.

The projects knows perfectly well my setup (and not because I posted it here, but because my BOINC manager knows it), but the persistently refuse to sent me a matching app. If I could set anything in my account, I would do so. I even asked about this possibility quite some time ago, another active choice by the project not to implement.

I can only be passive, as I have no possibility to choose.
The project actively sends the applications, the WUs and it decides alone what it deems to be suitable for my machine.
If they wanted, they had all possibilities to send only matching WUs and apps, they simply don't want.
They want my machine not to use CPU.
They want my machine to run the app on low priority.
They want my machine to crunch even extremely long WUs.
They want to send to my non-Fermi machine Fermi apps.
They want to waste my GPU-power.
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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

Saenger,

The final choice is yours.

You can crunch GPUgrid or not!

Please, stop this wastefull discussion on the forum from now.

Happy new year and go crunch RNA-World!

Use your card for Primegrid or Seti@home!
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Ton (ftpd) Netherlands

I also have a gt240 and i downgradet my driverversion to crunch some wu's in a normal time, because i thought the project is worth it, as a backup. And normally i do not spend time on an beta project but after reading the thread i think the project never be out of beta state.
The project is hunting for an application for the newest and fastet gpus that are available.....and not for as many crunchers as possible....that is no science, just my to cents.
Even if i buy today the fastest gpu i can get, i can not be shure i can use it on gpugrid in 12 month.....I think the project should think about this.

Only my opinion.
I would upgrade my driver that i can crunch Einstein.

Saenger, I couldn't get my GT240, 8800GT, & GTX260 to work with Linux either, both Mint Linux 8 & Mint Linux 10 failed, I couldn't get it to work no matter what. So I gave up & decided to use Windows 7 90day Enterprise evaluation instead link

I hope this helps. Nothing else did... :-(
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Perhaps you missed the bit where I described the 260 driver issues; it causes some GPUs (especially GT240's) to slow down to lowest power mode, making tasks take about 7 times as long. This will still happen on Einstein or Folding or any other project because it is a driver problem.

In itself this is a good enough reason to not force people to use this driver, but by doing so you can only crunch tasks on the 6.13app, which is slower for GT240's; because it was primarily written with Fermi cards in mind.

As you have repeatedly noted the project team has made their choices ... perhaps it is now time for you to make yours to either work with the project as best you can or move on.
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Thanks - Steve

As you have repeatedly noted the project team has made their choices ... perhaps it is now time for you to make yours to either work with the project as best you can or move on.

Still, for whatever reason(s) there are ups & downs, looking at that graph is like looking at the stock market. There's little love & little trust. Even if the top 5 crunchers do 10% of the work, The top 20 crunchers do 22% and the top 100 crunchers do 45%, that drop looks like there's little trust & little love, maybe all this; if you don't like it, go somewhere else because "science" requires us to tell you to go somewhere else...
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The last three weeks or so have been almost all KASHIF wu's. They return the least points, at about 85% of the previous average.

I have given up on GPUGRID for good this time... what a waste of time!!!

sk and SAM bring up excellent reasons for some of the PPD decline but I think most of the downward trend was from the SETI crunchers who joined us when their project went down and then returned to their favorite project when it came back on line.

If there was a stats site that displayed more than 60 days of history you would probably also see that this recent decline really is only a bubble and that, overall, the project has continued to increase PPD over time.

While recognizing that the XtremeSystems team is most comprised mostly of dedicated 24/7 crunchers with hardware adequate for this project, our stats have steadily increased with minor flucuations based on normal joins and departures, not based on project complexities, but rather on personal goals. Has anyone looked at other teams to see if the same is true for them?

Are there any stats on the length of time people who have departed have been joined with the project?

If it is a quick turnaround then maybe more focus can be placed on clarifying just how demanding the science of this project is to help set expectations. That might help avoid the hightened disappointment we are seeing in this (and some others) thread.
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Thanks - Steve

For people who find it hard to run GPUGrid on older cards, you might like to know that Einstein has improved the efficiency of its CUDA app (Windows only, so far), and it's now roughly comparable with SETI on one of my 9800GT cards (6,320 seconds for a BRP3 task, under Windows XP/32). Edit - forgot to say that it still uses quite a bit of CPU, though not nearly as much as the old ABP2 app.