School starting.

Thought I'd post something to let people know that semester 1 classes begin tomorrow. This means I won't be able to dedicate as much time to my "toys" and hence the content updates on the blog will most probably suffer.

I'll be continuing to watch things and might post now and then. If you have any requests or suggestions for porting BOINC apps over to a certain platform feel free to post and I can try have a look into it when I get a chance.

My PSU Project.

I decided that it was time to set up a cleaner, more permanent solution for providing 5V and 12V in my server rack. Here's some photos with details outlining where I'm at so far.

4 x 20A rated terminal blocks. 2 of them are for +5V and +12V. The cable I used is auto stuff rated for 10A. I split common ground (GND) over 2 terminal blocks so I don't overheat cabling. Also saves device cabling from reaching.

Rear shot of where terminal blocks are secured in rack.

 

550W ATX PSU with +5V, +12V and GND feeds. The PSU is getting 240V straight from my UPS (to the left). Those terminals off the feeds are high quality gold plated banana type terminals with plastic covers.

I need to clean up the wiring a little bit. A few additional things to do:

• Get 10A in-line fuses for +5V and +12V. Although PSU is current limiting (shuts off when over current), I really don't want to get to this stage.
• Put a permanent resistor on the +12V circuit. Although I'm constantly pulling something of +12V, I noticed very weird behavior on the +5V when there is nothing doing so. I believe this is related to the PSU needing current draw on +12V in order to function properly.
• Get a cover for the terminal blocks and some sort of support for device cabling.
• More cable clean-up.
• Shunt for reading current draw on +12V and +5V circuits.

SubsetSum@Home for the Pi

I had a request to try port SubsetSum for Raspberry Pi (ARMv6l). I've managed to get it done.

You can find the project files over on my Raspberry Pi project page or use this direct link:

https://github.com/dcarrion87/boinc-rpi/raw/master/bin/subsetsum-armv6l.tar.gz

Successful task completion:

http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/subset_sum/result.php?resultid=1345268

A journey from FORTRAN to C and OpenCL

You may have noticed a reduction in blog posts of late. The cause is a GPU porting project I've undertaken for theSkyNet POGS. I guess I should post something about it, in case some of you are interested.

As you may or may not know, the guts of the main POGS application is MAGPHYS. Basically,  this science application loops through library files to find a best fit of different attributes for a given image pixel. The problem with the existing client is the main section of code loops through in a brute-force sequential kind of fashion. Hence, the application by default is not very "parallel" and requires re-work to parallalise and produce a successful GPU port.

We decided that converting from FORTRAN (F77) to C/C++ initially would be the best option as most of the GPU platform frameworks uses some derivation of C99. This is not to say that frameworks such as OpenCL and CUDA don't support other languages, it was just cleaner this way. Our choice of GPU framework was OpenCL.

The actual port from FORTRAN to C was fairly straight-forward, however, there were quite a few little "gotchas". This included things like: array indexing differences - FORTRAN starts at 1; floating point problems - FORTRAN does not do nearest-even rounding; and, overall output "weirdness" attributed to FORTRAN and C differences. None of these really kept me bogged down for too long. It just meant a lot of debugging and customised functions to get around them. These are temporary since the goal is to eventually move over to the C client only.

For the GPU port, it was a bit of a learning curve being the first time implementing OpenCL kernel code. I've worked with things like threading before, however, parallelising code for processing on a GPU was new to me. After hours of reading, I dove right in and started coding. 

Writing the C code to prepare the OpenCL program, kernel, devices etc... and run the kernel was fairly easy. The tricky part was re-working some of the data that was going to be buffered into device memory and read back later. I decided that batching up sets of library models for the kernel threads to crunch was the best option. This essentially meant parsing the library model arrays to the device memory once and allocating space in device memory for the kernel threads to output data. At the end of the batch I would read back memory from the device and have a C based loop consolidate those results appropriately.

At present, we get a 3 - 4 time speed increase using the OpenCL implementation on modern machines with modern cards. There is a bit more work to increase that slightly by parallelizing the post batch part that accumulates output results. I find the biggest bottleneck to be reading large quantities of memory back from the device. If I can do the post batch stuff inside the device, I can reduce the amount of memory to be read back from the device before moving onto the next batch of models.

Overall, the porting process has been a great learning exercise. I'm hoping that in the next month the application can be stabilised and released to the public to crunch POGS on their GPUs. This needs approval from the project leader of course. I know there are a few more hurdles to overcome, but I'm optimistic.

Regarding my little cruncher projects (Raspberry Pi and ODROID), I will try and get back into them. I have 4 subjects coming up in Semester 1 so I'm guessing that this will drown most of my “play time”.

Pete's Blog is useful for crunching on ARM

Just wanting to plug Pete's Blog over at:  http://hmastuff.com/setiathome-6.12.armv7l-unknown-linux-gnu_cubieboard

He's got a section dedicated to Raspberry Pi and has been getting BOINC running on other ARM devices like the Cubieboard. Go check it out!

An ATX power option

Some of you may already know how to do this, however, if you're looking for some 5V power for your Raspberry Pis, ODROIDs, etc... Wiring up an ATX power supply is one option.

Here's some photos to illustrate how. Note, this is not a permenent solution for me. I suspect anyone doing this for something permanent would do it a lot cleaner and with a very efficient power supply. I use this for quick 12V and 5V power for testing. See this video for proper setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2oSFpKh_Uw

My 650W standby power supply with 5V 30A rail.

Using 5V from molex connector to micro USB cable. It's soldered, I promise! Depending on your power supply you may need to draw something from the 12V circuit for it to actually work.

Shorting pins so the PSU actually feeds power to those connectors on when you flick the power switch on the back of the PSU. 

Where's the ODROID update?

Sorry I haven't been keeping you up to date on how my ODROID-U2s have been going. I've been busy with school work, coming up to the end of my summer unit.

I've only loaded POGS on it so far to see what sort of RAC I get: http://allprojectstats.com/show.php?projekt=0&id=29095466. Around 1000. Fairly low. I've been meaning to recompile that binary and also test some other projects. Should probably load some NCI projects on there (OProject and WUProp).

I've yet to load up my second U2 with Android to give NativeBOINC a shot, but I will shortly. I will! I need to got get some correct fitting DC jacks. I'm not repeating what I did with the current one that's on and I don't wish to share it due to the dodgy levels.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post some links Ray_GTI-R has been sharing as they're quite useful. In case you don't know, he's fairly active in the community when it comes to ARM crunchers. Ray, hope you don't mind me giving you a plug.

Ray's links

His NativeBOINC U2s in the lead:
http://nativeboinc.org/site/host_stats#order=dcredits

5V distribution board for his gear:
http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h216/Ray_GTI-R/Dscn4757.jpg
Fully fused distribution board for 5V 10A PSU. Each output has a 2.5A slow-blow fuse (all Maplin items) to each ODROID.

5V power supply:
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/110923861995  I've actually just purchased one of these!

DC jacks for U2:
Maplin L43AY

Power supply warning:
http://odroid.foros-phpbb.com/t2479-power-supply-warning

Cheers Ray for sharing your experiences with us!