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Multi-GPU BOINC PC

Linux Kernel, Network, and Services configuration.
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schmidtbag
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Multi-GPU BOINC PC

#1 Post by schmidtbag »

I'm putting together a PC dedicated for BOINC. For the most part, this PC will be running headless, and will only be accessed by a GUI for maintenance. This PC involves 4x GPUs, both AMD and Nvidia; only one of the AMD GPUs will be connected to a display, so, none of the others will have any use for graphics acceleration.

So here's what I'm wondering:
1. As of writing, closed-source drivers offer the best GPGPU performance. I intend to install fglrx, but I'm wary of the Nvidia drivers, since they have a tendency to meddle with libgl - that's not ideal when I have an AMD GPU for display purposes. From what I heard, you can install fglrx after nvidia-driver to work around the libgl issue, but that could be a real burden during updates. The boinc-nvidia-cuda package wants to install glx-diversions, which I suspect is something I don't want. If I were to get the drivers directly from Nvidia, you can install them with "--no-opengl-files", but I would much rather install the drivers from the package manager for ease of maintenance. Any suggestions?
2. Would I only need to configure xorg.conf for the display GPU, or will BOINC be able to utilize the other GPUs?
3. I intend each GPU to handle a different workload. Using gpugrid will be easy, since that depends on CUDA (so the AMD cards won't use it) but I want the AMD cards to run different tasks too, such as seti, einstein, and milkyway. Though it seems this should be possible, there's not enough documentation on this, so I don't know for sure how to go about it.

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