New Einstein@Home Radio Pulsar Search and NVIDIA GPU Code

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Einstein@Home is beginning a new round of searching for radio pulsars in short-orbital-period binary systems. This is accompanied by the release of a new application (called BRP3). The new application is particularly efficient on NVIDIA Graphics Processor Cards (up to a factor of 20 faster than the CPU-only application). In addition, when running on an NVIDIA GPU card, this new application makes very little use of the CPU (typically around 20% CPU use when the GPU is devoted to Einstein@Home). The NVIDIA GPU application is initially available for Windows and Linux only. We hope to have a Macintosh version available soon. Due to limitations in the NVIDIA drivers, the Linux version still makes heavy use of the CPU. This will be fixed in Spring 2011, when a new version of the NVIDIA Driver is released. Many thanks to NVIDIA technical support for their assistance! Because we have exhausted the backlog of data from Arecibo Observatory, this new application is being shipped with data from the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey (from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia). In the next weeks we expect to also start using this new application on fresh Arecibo data taken with the latest ‘Mock Spectrometer’ back-end. Questions, problems or bug reports related to this new application and search should be reported in this news item thread as a ‘Comment’. Bruce Allen Director, Einstein@Home

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another GPU crunching project, awesome :smiley:

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BuRP3 application (sorry, had to do it)… may have to fire up Einstein again. I ran Einstein as a filler while SETI was down, but shut it off when SETI started up again.

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Couldn’t get any Einstein units the last time I tried.

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Selected the project for GPU only before leaving for work as it wasn’t fetching then. Done one unit now, how high is the CPU usage? Almost 50% of a core based on reported runtimes.

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Ok, home now so can look at it more closely.

Processor usage is fluctuating around 10-14% on a quad, so that’s effectively 40-56% of a single core. Running gpu-z the GPU load on a 450GTS is around 54% and 18% memory load. I like this, as that the GPU load doesn’t max out like on primegrid which makes windows laggy when it is running. Also the GPU temps are lower :slight_smile: I think I’ll be running this one now, until I find something more interesting.