UK BOINC Team Forum

Hi Folks,

I'm approaching a new build and am looking at a dedicated (or dual boot) Linux box this time around, because there seem to be some CPU compute advantages on some projects. I'll also have some Windows boxes …

So, my question is whether there are advantages or disadvantages in terms of running nvidia gpus within Linux vs Windows environments for compute? I wasn't sure, given that I suppose GPUs come down to CUDA and OpenCL rather than being dependent on the OS kernels? I know that gaming drivers tend to be better on Windows though.

At the moment, I am planning to keep the GPUs in the windows boxes but I'm not 100% sure that this is the right approach.

Thanks a lot.

Hi Damien.

Generally, Nvidia GPUs work well in Linux, AMD can occasionally be troublesome and a mix is nigh on impossible!

Drivers for Linux are open source so not quite as 'good' as the Nvidia ones but as you pointed out, the CUDA and OpenCL drivers are pretty standard. I have several dual boot systems and I've not noticed more than a percentage point or two between them for GPUs. Newer GPUs take longer to get recognised but the RTX2080Tis are already detected.

For ease of use, I'd keep the GPUs in the existing Windows boxes if you're going to be keeping them going although swapping them to a Linux box should be straightforward.

Mark

Cool, thanks Mark. Sounds like my options are pretty open. That's a good way for options to be ...

Hi,

Just my two cents....

Couple of points really to add to this post. Firstly, proper Nvidia drivers for Linux are available and written by Nvidia themselves. On most versions of Linux you have to download these after installation (either directly from the Nvidia website, or from your repository manager). The gaming improvements will be because of Direct X - as far as im aware Direct X isn't officially supported by Linux, but I'm yet to see a distributed computing project that would use it anyway.

The main advantage of using linux in a compute context is the more lightweight nature of it- you can go as far as running linux totally headless if you want to, with probably only a handful of megabytes of video memory required for the operating system.

Windows - advantage: easy to set up, no need to dual boot, less general faff to set it up. Disadvanage: more bloaty, more OS usage of GPU/system memory.

Linux - advantage: lighter weight, no licencing costs and still has official drivers available. Disadvantage: bit more effort to set up, and requires more effort to fix things when they do go wrong.

Edit: Its also easy to set up multiple GPUs in Linux. Stick to the same vendor though (AMD or Nvidia), avoid mixing the two because its just going to be more hasstle than its worth.

regards

Andrew

Thanks Andrew.

I have most machines on dual boot now. My gaming system with dual GPUs stays on windows, but the others mostly run on Linux flavours now.

I’m progressively getting the hang of Linux. It still seems weird to have to go into the command line in many distros, in order to edit text / xml as ‘Sudo’!