Hello, just a quick post to announce optimizations are live for Kaktwoos and so are a new set of tasks, following our news post of the first naturally generated 23-block tall cactus being found!

If you see the executable "kaktwoos_2.11" being run on your computer, then the optimized BOINC application is now on your system. It may take a few hours for your systems to be synced, but going forward we hope to collect performance improvements (or regressions) for as many GPU models as possible. These optimizations primarily are for Nvidia and AMD GPUs, aside from the RX 5000/6000 series due to major performance losses from to their architecture being different. Any Kaktwoos-cl compatible AMD card, or APU may see up to 30% performance improvement, and up to 50% in the case of Vega architecture GPUs due to their large caches which were previously underutilized. For some, your computers may use a bit more power than before, but this does not mean they are less efficient at running our new code.

Optimizations summary:

"kaktwoos-amd.cl"
RX 5600/5700/6800/6900 - Optimizations disabled as new kernel is much slower it seems
Vega 56 went from 42 -> 63m/s (million seeds a second) (+50%!)
RX 480 went from 17 -> 25m/s (+30%!)
r5 540M went from 3.9 -> 5.35m/s (+30%!)

"kaktwoos-nv.cl"
RTX 3090 went from 225 -> 232m/s (+5%?)
RTX 2060 went from 52 -> 73/80m/s (+60%)
GTX 1650M went from 50 -> 52m/s (+5%)
GTX 1080ti went from 61 -> 58.4m/s (-3%) (may just be test kernel and environment)
GTX 1070 had no change in perf, 53.3m/s
GTX 960 had a slight reduction, 18.2 -> 17.5 m/s (-3%)

If you would like to help us out on this front of testing uncommon GPUs, please join our discord and check the #questions_and_help channel after going through the welcoming process and reading our rules! Or, just post in this thread after going through "Your Tasks", either online or using the BOINC Client's advanced view and comparing the completed tasks before Feb. 11/12 to the latest validated ones.

In the case of any errors, or worse performance consistently from these changes, please post here, message us so we can either diagnose the issue on our end, or attempt to revert the kernel for that specific card (if performance losses are greater than 5-10%, and it is on a common model!)

download errors
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/result.php?resultid=3888451

Hi, that's... weird. The files seem to match fine on our server, and are downloadable (manually)
Can you try to 'reset' MC@Home project in your BOINC client and/or re-add us, then press update and see if the files download?

I'm looking at our server, and the files themselves are there, the signatures seem to match up and so do their sizes. Yet, atm, Linux-Intel Kaktwoos isn't downloading properly...despite us not modifying it unlike everything else for this update and optimization


kaktwoos_2.11_opencl_intel_gpu.bin
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/download/kaktwoos_2.11_opencl_intel_gpu.bin
1511656

kaktwoos_2.11_opencl_intel_gpu.cl
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/download/kaktwoos_2.11_opencl_intel_gpu.cl
4120

(edit to fix and add numbers)

In my "huge" test sample of two, these are the results on my old graphics cards.

First sample is my GTX 1060. Average run time is 3654 seconds with the 2.11 application and 3462 seconds with the 2.10 application. About a 5% loss in production.
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/results.php?hostid=596&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid=

And the run times have actually gone up even more on my GTX 750ti. Average of 10687 seconds per task with the 2.11 application and 9996 seconds per task with the 2.10 application. That's a loss of almost 10% in production.
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/results.php?hostid=649&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid=

The computers are both running the kaktwoos_2.11 application.

Granted, these are old graphics cards so probably not much of a priority. I just thought I'd give a bit of feedback since you've probably mostly tested the new apps on newer graphics cards...

Thanks for that. It seems like on weaker and/or older Nvidia cards that they lose around 5% performance, while others don't lose any. Meanwhile, the RTX 2000 series has a lot to gain from these, so I can look into doing what we did on AMD and switching back to the original kernel for the 750ti/1060.

I might have to manually check (sadly) through a bunch of GPU results to see how good the changes are as well, but yeah.

v2.10 -> 2.11
RTX 3070 (160 -> 176m/s!)
(RX 6800 is doing well at 153m/s, without optimizations)
RTX 2080S (103 -> 107!)
RTX 2080 (90 -> 108.9!)
RTX 2070S (103.4 -> 108)
Titan X Pascal (64.8 -> 61) X
RX Vega? (45.5 -> 52!)
GTX 1650 (45.3 -> 45.7)
GTX 1070 (37.5 -> 35.5) X
GTX 1050ti (13.2 -> 14.7?)
GTX 970 (32 -> 30m/s) X
GTX 1060 (27.3 -> 25.8) X
RX 580 (21 -> 26.4!)
GTX 950 (16.5 -> 15.5) X
QDR4000M (14.5 -> 13.3) X
(Note that RX 580 is finally as fast as a GTX 1060 in kaktwoos, when both are at their 'best' performance)

did reset - no change - took a while to successfully attempt, i think there's a WU limit on hosts with failures?
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/result.php?resultid=3998974
in the applications page, this is the one app with 0 flops (and a different modification time)
worked fine previously

Thanks for that check. Will def need to see if the server needs to reverify its files for that. I don't understand why all the other updates went through, except for this one.

Do you mind trying to find your BOINC data & project folder (Maybe /usr/ or /var/boinc) and copying over those files in my previous post to a path like
"boincdata/projects/minecraftathome.com_minecrafthome/(files)"?

Then chmod +x kaktwoos.bin and that should get BOINC closer to running

i get a real 404 when i try to download the bin file using wget/curl
the cl file is ok

Now the application doesn't show at all under https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/apps.php for Linux opencl_intel_gpu

I've got a couple of Win10 hosts which won't download intel WUs either, but I assume that's because the opencl version is too old or something (they work fine with einsteinathome)

it took a while for my host to manage to download anything since the app changes, but appears to be working correctly with 2.10 (opencl_intel_gpu)