Re: running CUDA cards
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 05:20:35PM +0200, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> I have just set up a gaming machine with
>
> Gigabyte GA 890FXUD5
> AMD Phenom II 10775T
> 2 x GTX470 GPU cards
> 4 x 4GB RAM
> 2 x 1 Tb HD for RAID1
>
> and need to install amd64 to run molecular dynamics using (free for
> non-commercial use) NAMD software (released binary below or
> compilation from source). All that is experimental, with little
> experience and I have no experience whatsoever with CUDA cards. My
> question is about the version of amd6a to be best used (lenny or
> squeeze) and what should be added to the typical server installation
> according to the requirements:
Lenny will stop having support soon, so absolutely go with squeeze.
The nvidia-glx package in squeeze supports the GTX470 card. Lenny does
not. So install squeeze.
To install the driver, add 'contrib non-free' to your lines in
/etc/apt/sources.list then do:
apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-kernel-dkms
apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-dev libcuda1-dev libcuda1
> (1) NVIDIA Linux driver version 195.17 or newer (released Linux
> binaries are built with CUDA 2.3, but can be built with newer versions
> as well).
squeeze has 195.36.31 so that should work.
> (2) libcudart.so.2 included with the binary (the one copied from the
> version of CUDA it was built with) must be in a directory in your
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH before any other libcudart.so libraries. For example:
>
> setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
> (or LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH)
> ./namd2 +idlepoll <configfile>
> ./charmrun ++local +p4 ./namd2 +idlepoll <configfile>
The libcuda1 package should probably take care of the library I think,
but maybe not.
wheezy has a lot more cuda packages available, and much newer drivers too,
but is of course testing, not stable.
> THE FOLLOWING CAN BE SKIPPED, unless one is specifically interested in
> the matter: The +idlepoll in the command line is needed to poll the
> GPU for results rather than sleeping while idle, i.e. NAMD does not
> use any non-specified GPU card. Each namd2 process can use only one
> GPU. Therefore you will need to run at least one process for each GPU
> you want to use. Multiple processes can share a single GPU, usually
> with an increase in performance. NAMD will automatically distribute
> processes equally among the GPUs on a node. Specific GPU device IDs
> can be requested via the +devices argument on the namd2 command line,
> for example:
> ./charmrun ++local +p4 ./namd2 +idlepoll +devices 0,2 <configfile>
--
Len Sorensen
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