Hi Simone, On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 09:15:33 +0100, Simone Mannori <[email protected]> wrote: > I have successfully installed pyopencl on a i7 laptop with a Mobile > 5850 ATI video card. > My software configuration is: > - Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit > - Stream 2.2 (AMD/ATI) > - latest AMD/ATI mobile video driver (10.10) > > Playing with the various demos included in pyopencl : > 1./ if the code runs on the CPU (using OpenCL) all the 8 "cores" of > the i7 goes to 100% , but the machine is still usable; mouse react and > the other windows are active; > 2./ if the same code run on the GPU (using OpenCL) the machine > "freeze" completely during the execution of the kernel. > > N.B: "freeze" means that the PC does not react during kernel execution > but, at the end, my laptop correctly restart normal operation: no > stability problem, sudden crash or memory leaks. Numerical results are > ok in both cases. I suspect that is not a stability related issue but > only how "wait" is implemented (probably there is a "busy wait" inside > the GPU code). > > My "newbie" questions are: > - situation 2./ is it normal? Can I avoid the "freeze" of the machine ?
I don't think the machine *actually* freezes--it's just that while the GPU is busy computing, your display will not update. (Which I find understandable.) Try running a (CPU) program in parallel to your computation and see if it makes progress while your GPU is active. I'd bet it does. This behavior is actually the same on Nvidia GPUs. The only recipe against that is to only submit compute kernels that finish in ~10 ms or less, making the interruptions bearable. The mouse movement still feels a bit jittery, but not so severe as to make the machine unusable. > - can I use CPU _and_ GPU at the same time? How do that from pyopencl ? You just create a context on each and go to town. > Another observation is about the amount of available memory reported: > - pyopencl reports 3Gbytes for the CPU and 512Mbytes for the GPU, but > I have 6Gbyte of RAM and 1Gbyte of video RAM .... That seems implementation-dependent, and not likely the fault of PyOpenCL. For my Nvidia card, I get the full ~1GB. For the AMD CPU CL implementation, I get 3 out of six GBytes like you. Not sure what's going on. Andreas
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