HOWTO donate CPU to the fight against the Corona-virus

Stefan Ehmann shoesoft at gmx.net
Sun Mar 22 10:38:41 UTC 2020


On Saturday, March 21, 2020 12:07:55 PM CET Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> 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-f
> >> ree 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.

I'm pretty sure now that libOpenCL is only relevant for GPU slots.

I couldn't reproduce that the presence of libOpenCL.so has any effect on CPU
slots. Didn't make much sense anyway, something else must have been going on.
So there's probably no point in getting OpenCL to run on FreeBSD until we have
GPU rendering.

The numbers displayed by FAHControl are rather strange:
* There is no discernible difference in speed if 1 or all CPU cores are used
(but top shows that 600% CPU cycles are burned) - happens on both Ubuntu and
Linuxolator
* According to the progress bar, Ubuntu completes 1% per minute, but
Linuxolator only 0.1% (for the same work unit)

Don't know if the numbers displayed are bogus or there is really that much of
a difference. Maybe the issue is only related to a specific WU or to AMD-CPUs.

I've also tried https://fahbench.github.io/ but it's mainly targeted at GPUs
and uses a different Core.




More information about the freebsd-current mailing list