Moving to Linux - I took the plunge

[lionel.heron]

Decided to take the plunge and moved 2 boxes to Linux 
Went to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Installed Seti optimised app, running cuda 10.1
Am happy with result
Crunching WUs in 1:55, with RAC rising from circa 35k-40k to (your guess is as good as mine but it looks as though it will be circa 100k)

Now to get everyone onto Linux ... mmmwwaaahhhhhaaaahhhaaaahhhaaa

[Dingo]

Decided to take the plunge and moved 2 boxes to Linux 
Went to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Installed Seti optimised app, running cuda 10.1
Am happy with result
Crunching WUs in 1:55, with RAC rising from circa 35k-40k to (your guess is as good as mine but it looks as though it will be circa 100k)

Now to get everyone onto Linux ... mmmwwaaahhhhhaaaahhhaaaahhhaaa

Have fun it is not as user friendly as Windows but keeps the brain working.  You can find most answers on GOOGLE and quote Ubuntu 18.04 in the search.  If you run into problems post here as well we might be able to help, although I use google most of the time when I am stumped.

[lionel.heron]

don't mind the challenge, it keeps the brain working
now considering the move of the other 2 boxes
they're a bit older (kind of Q6600 vintage) with 780 TIs in them so should be a bit of fun

[tazzduke]

Hi Lionel,

Excellent work, man your RAC will skyrocket now.

Might be wise to replace to 780ti's with something newer that can run the special app.

There is a version of the special app for the 780s but its a few years old now.

Some of the lads over at SETI might be able to help you out though.

Cheers and excellent crunching

[lionel.heron]

I'm running 1WU per GPU.
Completion time is circa 1:55 (1 minute 55 seconds)
I went to 2 WUs per GPU but they took longer on average so went back to 1 per GPU.
Later on I went through some of the documentation that was with the optimised app and it said that 1 per GPU gives the best result......
The only thing I needed to do was modify the app_info file for cuda 10.1 which is in the 418.56 nvidia package.
So far things seem to be going well.
My next task is to start to look at the settings for the GPUs and see if I can tweak them to reduce run times.
Generally it looms like I'm heading back to six figures per Linux box.

For anyone that only crunches Seti and it's not there main driver, they should seriously consider going linux, implementation isn't that difficult.

[lionel.heron]

Hi Lionel,

Excellent work, man your RAC will skyrocket now.

Might be wise to replace to 780ti's with something newer that can run the special app.

There is a version of the special app for the 780s but its a few years old now.

Some of the lads over at SETI might be able to help you out though.

Cheers and excellent crunching

It looks like cuda 10.1 will run on anything with a compute capability above 3.0
The 780 TIs are 3.5 so cuda 10.1 should be OK
Soon find out......

[JugNut]

Gratz on the OS change over Lionel,  i'll have to do the same one day. 

[lionel.heron]

Installed opencl 1.2 and wu processing time has dropped from about 1:55 to about 1:30 - 1:32.
Happy with that.
Still have to play with gpu settings though, don't expect to much of a gain there but will be interesting to see.
Am still running 1 wu at a time and RAC appears to be heading to 125K.
Am not really processing wus on the cpu.
Will look at multiple wu processing later.

Have created a spare HD and am going to put ubuntu 19.xx on it and trial it in one of the older boxes with the gtx 780tis in it.
If all goes well will be moving both of them to linux.

[Dingo]

Good to see that your Linux changeover is going well.  Are you running the Command line server version or the desktop GUI version of Ubuntu?  I have used both in the past and found that using the GUI version is a lot easier but the command line version makes you learn more about the commands etc.

Good luck and hope you are happy with Linux and SETI. 

[lionel.heron]

am running the desktop GUI version (18.04) on both machines.
in order to install nvidia 418.56 i had to do via ppa, so did this via terminal (command line), good fun, 418.56 now included in 19.04.
am going to install 19.04 on one of the other boxes to see what it's like (not to worried about not having LTS on cruncher only machines).
am now trying to find some good references on linux to read/watch.
lots of stuff on youtube but presenters can be slow/painful ...

for a (seti only) cruncher machine I would highly recommend going linux coupled with the optimised app.