This Week in MLC@Home
Notes for Feb 1 2021
A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home

Summary
Paper coming together. The first round of datasets are cut and I will release them by the end of this week. Only issue is their size. I will likely make the full, larger datasets available as a torrent. Stay tuned for some new results and the big dataset release this week. The paper will follow shortly afterwards.

Detailed News

• A few people have asked if they can help with the client itself. The MLDS app is open source, and available for perusal at https://gitlab.com/mlcathome/mlds . I've created a number of issues under https://gitlab.com/mlcathome/mlds/-/issues to show thigns that need to happen. Some of which could potentially be tackled by other developers.
  
• Only issue is their size. I will likely make the full, larger datasets available as a torrent. When released, please consider seeding if you can.
  
• We've made our goal of having over 1000 entries for DS1/DS2, which allows the dataset release. This means we'll start mixing in other types of WUs than just DS2 WUs into the GPU queue again, balancing between the remaining DS1/DS2 and DS3 WUs. When DS4 is ready, we'll rebalance again.
  

Project status snapshot:
(note these numbers are approximations)






Last week's TWIM Notes: Jan 26 2021

Thanks again to all our volunteers!

-- The MLC@Home Admins(s)
Homepage: https://www.mlcathome.org/
Twitter: @MLCHome2projuct-summary-

his means we'll start mixing in other types of WUs than just DS2 WUs into the GPU queue again, balancing between the remaining DS1/DS2 and DS3 WUs. When DS4 is ready, we'll rebalance again.

Is there a "minimum" gpu for this project?
I have an entry level RX 550x and i don't know if it is usable...

GPUs need 2GB ram min.

RX550 is the minimum AMD GPU that will be supported, as I think the RX540 is not POLARIS-based (gfx803 in AMD nomeclature). POLARIS needs an updated client compiled against a later version of rocm (rocm 3.8 has a bug that keeps it from running on POLARIS). It's on the todo list but not ready yet. For now, the only AMD GPUs supported are VEGA-based (gfx900/906/908, not gfx902 APUs) and must be running Linux. Last night I just got pytorch working with rocm4., so that should be easier in the future. There's *some* support for NAVI in rocm, but its untested.

Note AMD APUs are not supported by rocm, and thus aren't supported by pytorch. Yes that's sad.

On the CUDA side, you need 2GB ram and compute capability 3.5 or higher. That's,... most GTX 700 series and up I think?