HOWTO donate CPU to the fight against the Corona-virus

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Stefan Ehmann <shoesoft at gmx.net> (from Sat, 21 Mar 2020  
11:38:26 +0100):

> On Thursday, March 19, 2020 8:57:45 AM CET Alexander Leidinger via freebsd-
> stable wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> if someone wants to donate some FreeBSD based CPU resources to the
>> fight against the Corona-virus, here is a quick HOWTO in terms of
>> installing the Folding at Home client on FreeBSD:
>>
>> https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2020/03/19/fighting-the-coronavirus-with-free
>> bsd-foldinghome/
>>
>
> Unfortunately, (using a CPU slot for the same work unit) TPF is 2-3 times
> slower than on Ubuntu for me. Much of the speed difference seems to  
> be related
> to libOpenCL. If remove libOpenCL on Ubuntu, it's still 20-30% faster than on
> FreeBSD.

The pure CPU based code should be the same. Someone would have to  
trace / reverse engineer what is going on.

> Don't know how stable the TPF numbers are, so numbers may be bogus.
>
> Will a CPU slot also use the GPU with libOpenCL or is it just using better
> optimized code? I tried to install libOpenCL but all I get is:

No idea. Just an assumption: either full CPU or full GPU.

> OpenCL: Not detected: clGetPlatformIDs() returned -1001

Depending on what clGetPlatformIDs is doing and if it is not  
using/requesting some GPU support, it may be worth to check the code  
of it so see if we can improve something.

> Since there's no CUDA support for FreeBSD, I guess there is no point  
> in trying
> getting GPU slots to work.

I assume the same. First step would be to get CUDA support in FreeBSD.  
I think I remember somewhere on the X11 mailinglist someone told that  
he got some NVidia GPU compute part working... not really sure about  
that part. It would help to get a big player to request it from  
NVidia. As Netflix seems to go the "encode videos on CPU" (assumption  
based upon their Intel av1 codec support/benchmarks) way, and other  
players in the video / graphics business more oriented towards linux,  
I do not have much hope in this regard ATM.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander at Leidinger.net: PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
http://www.FreeBSD.org    netchild at FreeBSD.org  : PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
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