Feb 24, 2012

Graphics on a Tesla C2070

By default, an Nvidia Tesla C20XX card is configured to run as a high performance multithreaded coprocessor.  You can use it to run CUDA and OpenCL programs, but it doesn't show up as an actual graphics card.  If you hook up a display to it, the display runs with Microsoft's vgasave driver, and does not show up as a DirectX device.

I spent pretty much an entire day trying to figure out how to get it to run as a graphics card.  In the back of my mind, I knew I had done it before, but just couldn't remember how.  I spent ages on live chat with Nvidia customer support.  I knew better than to trust first line support, and they were indeed a waste of time.  I eventually eked the memory back into existence.

In the driver install folder (typically C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI" run the command "nvidia-smi -dm 0".  This sets the driver to run in graphics mode, treating your Tesla card as a graphics card.

There's a number of reasons NVIDIA has two separate driver modes.  Graphics processing tasks have a maximum time limit of 2 seconds, after which Windows thinks the GPU has hung, and resets it.  If you have some high performance task running, say a raytracing operation that takes a minute, this may fail.  Running in a pure compute mode avoids this problem, but also disables the card from appearing as a graphics device.

Feb 8, 2012

Progress.

Big fan of this film.  Often non-techies seem to fear technology, because it's disruptive and changes the world.  Age old industries fall apart if when they don't embrace the change.  It should bring fear to those profiting from the old business, but for the everyman, it should be times for huge opportunity.

I suspect those who are afraid, aren't really looking hard enough for those opportunities.


PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.