OpenCL vs CUDA in BEAGLE

[Jacob Berv]

Does anyone have any experience with the OpenCL implementation of the beagle library for use with beast? I'm thinking about purchasing a new Mac Pro with dual AMD D700 GPUs, which have alot of GPU horsepower, and apparently beagle 2.1 supports OpenCL on AMD devices for accelerated computing  - is there anyone on here who has tried this combination? 

Jake

[Andrew Rambaut]

Hi Jake,

I have a MacPro with these GPUs but at present BEAGLE doesn’t work with them (runs fine on the CPU). We are trying to track down the issue but it seems to be a problem with Apple’s OpenCL implementation.

The new MacPro’s are very fast machines but at present we can’t make use of the GPUs.

Andrew

On 20 Jul 2014, at 15:21, Jacob Berv <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone have any experience with the OpenCL implementation of the beagle library for use with beast? I'm thinking about purchasing a new Mac Pro with dual AMD D700 GPUs, which have alot of GPU horsepower, and apparently beagle 2.1 supports OpenCL on AMD devices for accelerated computing  - is there anyone on here who has tried this combination? 

Jake

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Andrew Rambaut 

Institute for Evolutionary Biology | Centre for Infection, Immunity & Evolution 

Ashworth Laboratories, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH3 9JT, UK

contact – a.ra...@ed.ac.uk | http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk | tel +44 131 6508624

[Jacob Berv]

Have you tried running windows natively on the mac pro? Apparently the drivers for the D700 work way better in windows - 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1701890

Jake

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[Andrew Rambaut]

I am not sure I would go as far as using Windows but I do intend to install Linux and use the Intel OpenCL drivers which are very good (and allow the multicore processors to be used as a single BEAGLE device).

Andrew

[Jacob Berv]

Would that would allow you to use the GPUs in Linux? Does BEAGLE not recognize the multicore CPU in OSX? Do you have any sense of the potential performance improvement if the GPUs eventually did get working?

It seems like the potential GPU computing horsepower/dollar for Mac Pro with the 2 D700s is very great, given that purchasing equivalent AMD workstation GPUs for a DIY build are much more expensive. It seems the Mac Pro discount comes at the expense of ‘pro’ quality drivers.

Jake

[Andrew Rambaut]

It does (recognise multicore CPUs in OpenCL in OSX) but Apple’s OpenCL drivers are not fast (and a bug prevents BEAGLE running on the GPUs at all). 

Sad, because as you say the MacPro is a lot of machine for the money (and the CPUs really fly with BEAGLE). The small size also allows high density in

a room (assuming adequate cooling).

I hope that this situation improves.

I will try to get Linux running with the GPUs to test their potential (seems a shame to run have to run Linux but if these are going to be headless compute boxes

it doesn’t matter much).

Andrew

[Jacob Berv]

Have you had any success testing the GPUs under linux? We just ordered one of these machines... 

Jake

[Jacob Berv]

Just tried in OSX 10.10, still doesn't work. Do you have any updates from testing in linux? My next thing will be to try Ubuntu, but apparently the windows drivers hugely outperform linux (at least in OpenGL).

Jake

[Andrew Rambaut]

Intel has OpenCL drivers for Linux that seem as fast as Windows (and much faster than Mac OS X). Haven’t tested on Mac Pro yet. 

Andrew

[Ramón Fallon]

In the past, I have dualbooted mac OS X with Biolinux 8 (basically Ubuntu Trusty 14.04, with lots and lots of bio computing goodness) using refind.
* refind: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
* http://environmentalomics.org/bio-linux/

Intel OpenCL installs fairly well in Ubuntu (after you've blacklisted nouveau and  stuck on CUDA)... search posts on this mailing list, though it's not entirely stress-free. There's a big difference between stressfully getting something installed and working and then stresslessly not getting it done at all ... :-D

Generally, if you can install the CUDA SDK samples, and see smokeParticles working, it gives you a good initial idea about GPGPU performance.  "seeming" or "appearing" to be fast is one thing, often influenced by marketing, if I may say so.

[Jacob Berv]

Cool - I will look into that. I just went through getting MPI working on our mac (which was a huge pain).. so I’m capable of following instructions, as long as said instructions exist. I’m tempted to try Win8 because it would let me play some games :D

If I do I will report benchmarks here.

Jake

[Kent Kawashima]

Has anyone successfully installed Linux on the mac pro cylinder? Dual D700's would really be sweet but Andrew said he hasn't tested it yet.

[Jacob Berv]

Unfortunately I still haven't yet had time to test it in windows or Linux.

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