[Beowulf] NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, MD5, and "hobbyists"

[Jon Forrest]

Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:

> We've also encountered somme oddities, like CUDA code freezing a machine 
> running X.org (and using the proprietary NVIDIA driver),

I'm glad you mentioned this. I've read through much of the information
on their web site and I still don't understand the usage model for
CUDA. By that I mean, on a desktop machine, are you supposed to have
2 graphics cards, 1 for running CUDA code and one for regular
graphics? If you only need 1 card for both, how do you avoid the
problem you mentioned, which was also mentioned in the documentation?

Or, if you have a compute node that will sit in a dark room,
you aren't going to be running an X server at all, so you won't
have to worry about anything hanging?

How does this behavior change, if at all, when running Windows?

I'm planning on starting a pilot program to get the
chemists in my department to use CUDA, but I'm waiting
for V2 of the SDK to come out.

Cordially,

-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu