Hi.

I've just entered in the amazing world of distributed computation and I'm happy to donate my CPU/GPU spare time.

What's happening? I'm running the Boinc client 7.0.27, which I've downloaded directly from the Ubuntu 12.04 official repositories. In the global preferences, by default is marked an option to only enable the GPU while there is no keyboard and mouse activity in a fixed period of time, let say 5 minutes. The problem is after the period of inactivity Boinc never starts to use my Nvidia GTS 450 as is supposed.

By the way, I'm using wireless mouse and keyboard and I think there has already been problems with this kind of devices.

I suppose a valid workaround would be to switch between "always use GPU" and "use GPU as in preferences" as needed, because with the GPU always in use my system becomes laggy.

Any help/advice?


Thanks!

The fix for the idle detection is in BOINC 7.0.29
So either use the Berkeley installer, or try a beta BOINC from repositories, or force Ubuntu's package maintainers to update on their BOINC. 7.0.27 was never a recommended version anyway, so why they continue releasing it as one, is beyond anyone's guess.

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Nice, it's good to know the bug is now fixed.

So far I've been proving the workaround I've suggested, but unfortunately I noticed that when I change from "always use GPU" to "use GPU as in preferences", system becomes laggy anyway. For instance, Youtube videos are reproduced like in slow motion hehe. It's not horribly slow but yes a little.

Has this been fixed in the version you mention?


Thanks again!

There's nothing to fix there from a BOINC point of view.

What you see is a side-effect of you using the graphics processor on your videocard to do science calculations and at the same time expecting it to render 2D, 3D and video information. Depending on the brand and model GPU, the speed of the bus it's in and the amount of memory the card has, these things happen.

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Sorry but I think I didn't explain me good. Of course, when the GPU is doing calculations the system becomes almost unusable. In fact, GPU temperature quickly rises until 60ºC, as I expect.

The problem arises just after changing back to operate without GPU. The temperature decreases ok, but even after a few minutes I notice some strange glitches like the one mentioned above in the YT videos. This is what is worrying me, since I believed that I could freely change between this two "modes" without having impact.