I just got an email update from PC Design Lab regarding their new case. Those of you who follow the blog will know my ComputeCube machine is built into their QMicro2 case, which has been really good with only one or two tiny niggles. Although in fairness they are caused by the the amount of power cables and the heat emitted by the Asus rampage 2 gene northbridge arrangement and the Tesla C1060.
The new case looks good and their have adopted the suggestions from their clients. You may have a look at the new pre-order case here. Even though they have raised the cage I would have liked it to be slightly taller to help with airflow over the GPU's and power cable routing. Strangely they mention it can now support 750w power supplies, but I have been running a 1250w one in the older case for a while now with no problems.
The radiator bracket is a really good idea and would have helped sort out the Rampage 2 Genes overheating northbridge rather nicely.
If you are looking for a SFF case in my opinion there is nothing better out there and this new model raises the bar even further. Now if I could only get my hands on the new one and a watercooling kit :)
Showing posts with label Tesla C1060. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tesla C1060. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
Windows 7
While ordering a replacement power supply for one of my machines I decided to add a Windows 7 to the shopping cart.
This was in no small part prompted by the NVidia parallel nsight addin for visual studio which would not work on my XP machines. An additional contributing factor was the lack of SP3 for Windows XP Pro x64. Of course the new office 2010 will only run on XP SP3, Vista and Windows 7.
Having had a brief and scary encounter with Windows Vista I am pleasantly surprised with the new version of Windows. Microsoft have done a good job with this one.
The installation process had to be a "clean" one as there is no upgrade path from winXP x64. I took a full backup of my "ComputeCube" machine and without bothering to format the C drive just popped the DVD in and rebooted.
This was in no small part prompted by the NVidia parallel nsight addin for visual studio which would not work on my XP machines. An additional contributing factor was the lack of SP3 for Windows XP Pro x64. Of course the new office 2010 will only run on XP SP3, Vista and Windows 7.
Having had a brief and scary encounter with Windows Vista I am pleasantly surprised with the new version of Windows. Microsoft have done a good job with this one.
The installation process had to be a "clean" one as there is no upgrade path from winXP x64. I took a full backup of my "ComputeCube" machine and without bothering to format the C drive just popped the DVD in and rebooted.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Compute Cube
In a previous post I mentioned fitting my Tesla C1060 onto my aging Asus motherboard. It has been working well but a combination of slow host<->device transfers speeds of less than 1GB/s, 2GB ram and a relatively slow processor encouraged me to upgrade.
Some of the prerequisites for my new personal super computer were:
a) Must be small - my desk area is limited and I don't like putting computers on the floor where they consume dust better than any known vacuum cleaner...
b) Must have at least 2x pci express 2 (gen 2) slots as for decent GPU computing you need to get data in and out of the device as quickly as possible.
c) As quiet and cool as possible.
As it turns out the last one was the most tricky and needed the C1060 to do a bit of CFD for the airflow in the case.
After a lot of research, measurement and two days of building here are some pictures of the final result. The case is only 11" x 11" x 14" - ok it's not Exactly a cube.... but close enough :) The tape measure in the photos is to give some sense of scale.
Many thanks to NVidia who very kindly sent me two NVidia Tesla logos for me to stick onto the case!
[gallery]
Some of the prerequisites for my new personal super computer were:
a) Must be small - my desk area is limited and I don't like putting computers on the floor where they consume dust better than any known vacuum cleaner...
b) Must have at least 2x pci express 2 (gen 2) slots as for decent GPU computing you need to get data in and out of the device as quickly as possible.
c) As quiet and cool as possible.
As it turns out the last one was the most tricky and needed the C1060 to do a bit of CFD for the airflow in the case.
After a lot of research, measurement and two days of building here are some pictures of the final result. The case is only 11" x 11" x 14" - ok it's not Exactly a cube.... but close enough :) The tape measure in the photos is to give some sense of scale.
Many thanks to NVidia who very kindly sent me two NVidia Tesla logos for me to stick onto the case!
[gallery]
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Tesla C1060 memory performance #2
In my post a few days ago I mentioned that some of the numbers reported by the Visual Profiler needed further investigation.
In particular the device to device memory bandwith reported by the profiler differed from the value reported by the bandwith test sample. This was easily tracked down: according to the documentation, the profiler divides the bytes read/written by 10^9 whereas the bandwith test sample divides by ( time in milliseconds * 2^20). So: 1000*2^20/10^9 = 1.048576 i.e. the bandwith sample reports a lower number.
In particular the device to device memory bandwith reported by the profiler differed from the value reported by the bandwith test sample. This was easily tracked down: according to the documentation, the profiler divides the bytes read/written by 10^9 whereas the bandwith test sample divides by ( time in milliseconds * 2^20). So: 1000*2^20/10^9 = 1.048576 i.e. the bandwith sample reports a lower number.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Tesla C1060 memory performance
According to the CUDA programming guide the memory coalescing rules have been relaxed in devices with compute capability 1.2 or greater. Chapter 5 has a subsection entitled "Coalescing on Devices with Compute Capability 1.2 and Higher" which gives more information.
As I now have a C1060 which has compute capability of 1.3 I thought I'd run my old coalescing tests on it to see how it has improved. I modified the launch configuration to 32760 blocks in order to maximize utilization of all the Multiprocessors and increased the thread count to 256. These changes cause the kernels to report 100% utilization in profiler. I expected the uncoalesced part of the old tests to be quite kind to the Tesla as they fall within the parameters given in the programming guide and indeed the memory transfer rates were similar to a pure device to device copy. I then modified the uncoalesced kernels to avoid the auto coalescing of memory accesses in a half-warp.
As I now have a C1060 which has compute capability of 1.3 I thought I'd run my old coalescing tests on it to see how it has improved. I modified the launch configuration to 32760 blocks in order to maximize utilization of all the Multiprocessors and increased the thread count to 256. These changes cause the kernels to report 100% utilization in profiler. I expected the uncoalesced part of the old tests to be quite kind to the Tesla as they fall within the parameters given in the programming guide and indeed the memory transfer rates were similar to a pure device to device copy. I then modified the uncoalesced kernels to avoid the auto coalescing of memory accesses in a half-warp.
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Tesla C1060
On Tuesday I received my brand new Tesla C1060 :) right on the day it was promised by Armari.
A quick word about Tesla suppliers... Although Armari was efficient to deal with, some of the others were absolutely terrible. Possibly because I am a private individual only buying one unit or maybe just because their overall service is terrible. Their names are not mentioned here as I have complained already and it's only fair to give them a chance...
For those not familiar with the specs it has 30 multiprocessors giving 240 stream cores with 4GB of 512bit wide DDR3 memory. It is a rather large double slot 10.5 inch long PCI card.
A quick word about Tesla suppliers... Although Armari was efficient to deal with, some of the others were absolutely terrible. Possibly because I am a private individual only buying one unit or maybe just because their overall service is terrible. Their names are not mentioned here as I have complained already and it's only fair to give them a chance...
For those not familiar with the specs it has 30 multiprocessors giving 240 stream cores with 4GB of 512bit wide DDR3 memory. It is a rather large double slot 10.5 inch long PCI card.
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