bv2.co.uk

As of writing the combined download count of the GPU Thermal Monitor has hit 520

So far I’m yet to receive any major feedback on bugs etc which leads me to believe it: a) works perfectly or b) no-one is bothering to report issues. As I’m an optimist I’m going with option a 

I’ve had more requests for remote monitoring of the GPU temperature via a simple http request. This is something I need myself in order to keep track of temperatures in remote machines. This is now built in and in testing and bug fixing, hopefully to be released soon. I’ve not used completion ports as they seemed like overkill for what should be a light traffic application but as the source is included and under creative commons license please feel free to add them if needed. Secondly having it open source allows for some code review, which is important for security reasons as it now allows remote connections.

If you have found a bug or would like another feature added please drop me a comment or email.

Here is a small update to the Thermal Monitor which implements the “always on top” feature. This can be enabled and disabled by right clicking on its little system try icon.

This is not the point release as planned as some of the additional features were appearing a bit unstable on my Win XP pro 64 machine. Until I find time to sort them out I thought I would release the most requested feature.

The source code is included. It is still in masm and does include routines for non-standard window shapes and transparent blts etc - could be worth a look if you are interested in masm32.

It is now available in the downloads section or here:

[Download not found] - Please see Licenses Section for license details. By downloading you agree to be bound by the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Or as this is a hpc/cuda/parallel processing site:

Gustafson’s Law or Amdahl’s law?

Personally I prefer Gustafson’s Law …. it seems more logical to me or is this just because I’m inherently an optimist?

I would be quite interested on hearing your views on this - so comments /forum posts most welcome.

In other news:  The thermal monitor downloads have gone over 80! :)  The updated version (v0.2) is ready after mucking around with subclassing a control…. I will release it soon…

Otherwise I have been extremely busy on debugging a sparse matrix solver - bugs in huge datasets can be hard to find! Even with the aid of Gold / Sivler / Bronze kernels mentioned in the last post they have been proving remarkably tricky to isolate. Rather surprising to me is the fact that the long long data type doesn’t consume a lot more processing time than a normal unsigned int - so I have been using that wherever there is a risk of exceeding 2^32.

CFD code coming soon too - although I have unwound a lot of the optimizations in order to make it easier to understand and possibly be a good foundation for your own optimizations.

Right …. back to the grindstone!

Regarding new forum registrations:

The forums are set to email me should a new person sign up. I usually check these emails two or three times a day but there is a large volume of what I suspect are spammers who are getting around the somewhat trivial captcha.

If you have tried to register legitimately and not received a response in 24hrs please drop me a comment here and I’ll sort it out for you.

The Thermal Monitor hit 30 downloads today - ok not exactly a “killer app” - but so far not a single bug report :)    The updated one will be released soon, I’ve just been snowed under with work.

As at the time of writing there have been 20 downloads of the BV2 Thermal Monitor and so far not a single complaint / bug report :)   I’m going to take this as a good sign and not that people are just not reporting issues. If you do have an issue please report it on the forums.

I will try to get an update with the “always on top” button and some minor bug fixes out some time this weekend.

Expect more screenshots from my Lattice Boltzmann Method - D3Q19 implementation too - although I had to roll back 3 evenings of work on it due to a myriad of introduced bugs Naughty me for not running it against the regression data every night….  I’m thinking about releasing the source code for this too as there is not much in the way of simple D3Q19 lattice source on the web at the moment.

Last night I received an email asking how to install the BV2 Thermal Monitor application. The simple answer is:  you don’t.   I can see that it may not be clear from the original post. As the application is entirely self contained and does not depend on any C runtime you only need to:

extract the zip file to a directory of your choosing

double click the .exe file

You do need to have the NVidia drivers installed. You can make desktop shortcuts / start menu shortcuts to it in the usual manner. Please post any more queries to the forums.

Finally v0.1 of the BV2 GPU Thermal Monitor is ready for download. It is available in the downloads section of the site. The source code is included! Please note that I only partially translated the nvapi.h file to an .inc file.

Please note that it is licensed differently from other content here and is under the Creative Commons “Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales” License. Basically this means you are free to copy, use and modify the code/application in any way you like as long as: you give the original author credit and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

By downloading you agree to be bound by the license.

Ok legalities out the way

BV2 Thermal Monitor:

BV2 Thermal Monitor v0.1 Screenshot

Currently it is version 0.1 and does basic temperature monitoring of up to two NVidia GPU’s.

It updates approximately every 500ms.

It can be minimized to the system tray where hovering the mouse over the icon will display a tooltip with the temperatures detected. (more…)

I was hoping to release the GPU temperature monitor to the downloads section sometime during this last bank holiday weekend. I had also planned to sort out my somewhat ailing / overheating computer and perform some upgrades. Unfortunately the repair / upgrades took almost 2 full days. My pc is now running a lot cooler and a bit quieter and I am now something of an expert with heat spreader / heat sink cleaning and thermal grease application.  By the way artic silver is really good! Even before the 200 hour break in period mentioned on their site I’m already seeing more than 10 degrees lower temperature on the CPU.

As to the upgrades:  more posts on this later But it did include me purchasing Windows XP Professional 64bit.

The longer than expected pc maintenance time has impacted the GPU Thermal Monitor application and it won’t be ready for a few more days. A bit of good news about it though:  it works perfectly on Windows XP 64bit without any modifications. Don’t you just love asm :)  Some of my other C/C++ applications were not quite so happy on the new OS.

Keep watching this space for release date

(update 27/5/09 - I’ve now released v0.1 - see this post )

It’s been a while since my last post as I’ve been rather busy with work and some other projects - so time for a quick update. 

While working on some long running kernels I wanted to keep track of the GPU’s temperature and ran the monitor app that came on their installation disks. The problem with the monitoring apps that I have is that they are quite large and take up a lot of screen space and for some unknown reason they crash / stop working when viewed over VNC (or similar) remote control app.  Now as I mostly use my CUDA machines over the network this is not a good situation.

So decided to write my own :)  Here is a screenshot of the initial version. It still needs config and some cleaning up (can you spot the glitch by the minimize button?) and possibly some remote reporting over the network functionality. Currently it can display the temperature from two GPU’s and updates every 500ms. When minimized it sits in the system tray and updates its tooltip with the reported temperatures. I will be releasing it to the downloads section of the website sometime over the weekend. The current .exe is 146k (mostly the skin) and doesn’t require any installer.

GPU Thermal Monitoring Application

Nothing wrong with a bit of self promotion sometimes