Ubuntu – AMD A4-5300 and GPU computing on BOINC

14.04atiboincgpuopencl

I have an AMD A4-5300 APU, which is a dual-core CPU and GPU. It is OpenCL capable.

I am trying to get BOINC to recognise the GPU but it seems unable to.

Log (snipped):

[---] Starting BOINC client version 7.4.22 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
[---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))
[---] No usable GPUs found

I've been Googling for an answer for two days and I'm sorry to say that I have given up.

I'm using the latest fglrx (Catalyst 14.12) from AMD and the latest BOINC (7.4.22), though I've tried older versions of both with no luck.

I installed the relevant OpenCL and ICD packages which got the CPU recognised as OpenCL, but BOINC refuses to recognise the GPU. User:boinc is part of group:video, but I tried setting xvideo + anyway which made no difference.

I tried everything suggested on the BOINC forum but none of it works. It works if 7.4.22 is downloaded and run as the user (1001) currently logged in (though I tried it again and it wouldn't!), but not setting the BOINC user to that same user when it's run (after changing ownership on all the files), as suggested in that post. Running as root doesn't work either, but I really shouldn't have to do either of these things.

Can anyone help at all? I literally don't know where else to look.

Best Answer

The problem originally stems from running SSH with X forwarding (SSH -X) when connecting to the server. This sets $DISPLAY which blocks GPU detection.

Once I realised this it became apparent that due to restrictions in Ubuntu (and probably other distros), BOINC has to be run as the logged-in (via X) user.

Assuming the user is user1:

sudo service boinc-client stop
Change BOINC_USER=boinc to BOINC_USER=user1 in /etc/default/boinc (some parts of the init script can be cleaned up too)
Add "sleep 10" to startup() in /etc/init.d/boinc-client to allow the user to log in (needed)
sudo chown -R user1: /etc/boinc-client/*
sudo chown -R user1: /var/lib/boinc-client
sudo service boinc-client start

BOINC now correctly detects the GPU and crunches work units accordingly.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – OpenCL programming on CPU and GPU with Nvidia cards

Both Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream OpenCL implementation support the Khronos ICD extension, so when you call clGetPlatformIDs you'll get two different platforms, and therefore you can query for CPU/GPU devices on these platforms and of course the ATI platform will return the CPU device and Nvidia platform will return the GPU device.

Then you can create CommandQueues on these devices and start your kernel. Of course this means that it's not trivial to share the task between GPU and CPU, but at least having a button in your app that switches from CPU to GPU would be quite easy to do.

Ubuntu – Why OpenCL is not default (14.04, nVidia 331)

I don't exactly know why its happening or how somehow the problem is solved.

First of all, the nvidia-331-uvm is not activated from the start (god knows why). So let's activate it:

$ sudo modprobe nvidia-331-uvm
$ sudo mknod -m 666 /dev/nvidia-uvm c 249 0

Then if you do clinfo you'll have the same error about the ICD loader. Nonetheless, if you do it as root:

$ sudo clinfo

You'll get a good result (E: -30), and then you're also able to run the command as a non-root user. Long story short:

$ clinfo
I: ICD loader reports no usable platforms
$ sudo clinfo 
E: -30
$ clinfo 
E: -30
# then you run anything as non-root user

Then, also darktable -d opencl works well, or any opencl program ;).

UPDATE

I finally added the next lines in my /etc/rc.local file:

# begin opencl config
modprobe nvidia-331-uvm
mknod -m 666 /dev/nvidia-uvm c 249 0
clinfo
# end opencl config

Then everything works smoothly ;)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – OpenCL programming on CPU and GPU with Nvidia cards

Ubuntu – Why OpenCL is not default (14.04, nVidia 331)

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