I believe the concept is that OpenCL should have been a separate coproc
type rather than a subset of ATI or CUDA.  If not, I would make the case
that OpenCL should also be a subset of CPU so that it allows "mt" apps to
use OpenCL instead of OpenMP which is very easy to do if you already have
OpenCL apps for the GPUs.

For a specific example, , HD 7xxx hardware uses a different IL instruction
set such that using the Brook+ apps in Collatz on HD 7xxx GPUs causes
invalid results even though there are no errors while processing. (It
literally skips half the work but reports success.) Given that the Catalyst
13.x drivers seem to have dropped CAL support (they've been promising to do
that for a while), it confuses the volunteers in that they complain
that their ATI GPU works OK on project X but not on Collatz when they
really mean that their AMD GPU works fine running OpenCL apps on project X
but don't run the Brook+/CAL apps on Collatz.  So, it isn't about the
vendor, it is about the API (CUDA, CAL, Brook+, OpenCL, etc.).

While a project could choose to run one API or another, I don't know if
BOINC would be able to enumerate the devices properly. CUDA/OpenCL and
CAL/OpenCL don't have a common data field in their APIs that contains the
coprocessor type/id which would make it quite difficult for BOINC to know
which device number is already in use.  If not done as a subset of coproc
types, then each time a new GPU is released, it would have to be mapped
from one API to another and a new BOINC version built.  Or would it?

Jon Sonntag


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:29 PM, David Anderson <[email protected]>wrote:

> I don't understand the following.
> Can you give me example of how you think the anonymous
> platform mechanism should be changed?
> -- David
>
>
> On 15-Apr-2013 3:04 PM, Raistmer the Sorcerer wrote:
>
>> Not quite. It was just extrapolation.
>> Current situation with "ATI" type is poor enough even w/o any additional
>> accelerator types. BOINC treats 2 completely different GPU types
>> (different API
>> = different GPU type) as single one - "ATI".
>> If stock app can solve this by app plan classes, anonymous platform app
>> has no
>> such possibility. "ATI" accelerator type does't discriminate between CAL
>> and
>> OpenCL  APIs.
>>
>>
>>
>> Понедельник, 15 апреля 2013, 12:17 -07:00 от David Anderson
>> <[email protected]>:
>>
>>     I think there's a misunderstanding.
>>     If AMD started selling a different type of coprocessor,
>>     we'd treat it as a new coprocessor type, not as an ATI GPU.
>>     -- David
>>
>>     On 15-Apr-2013 1:28 AM, Raistmer wrote:
>>      > I would like to attract BOINC devs attention to this issue
>> described here:
>>      > http://setiathome.berkeley.**edu/forum_thread.php?id=71192&**
>> postid=1357117<http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=71192&postid=1357117>
>>      >
>>      > In short, current BOINC accelerator separation by vendor names is
>>      > inappropriate and already caused issues. Type of accelerator API -
>> that's
>>      > what matters, not vendor name. If device supports few APIs it
>> should be
>>      > listed under all supported types. But different API should mean
>> different
>>      > type (it's possible/convenient to have few types for same API like
>> in case of
>>      > OpenCL, but in no circumstances different APIs should share same
>> type as in
>>      > the case of "ATI" type currently).
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