GPU Folding through a VM

Dragon667 · October 23, 2018

I have a spare lab VMware cluster at work that is just sitting around doing nothing 90% of the time. One of the hosts happens to have a AMD FirePro V7800 GPU sitting in it. I decided it would be cool to put it to some use and routed the GPU to a simple Windows 10 VM sitting in the cluster. I installed Folding@Home, and it sees the GPU and recognizes it's type and model, but will never download a WU for it. It just keeps coming back with "Failed to get assignment from '65.254.110.245:8080': No WUs available for this configuration.

What's strange though is that I've seen the V7800 listed as being compatible for Folding in the big folding GPU list. Any thoughts?

Also it's not a network/firewall issue as I can get standard CPU WU's fine, as well as WU's for some 1050 Ti's that are sitting in physical boxes here and there.

Metallus97 · October 24, 2018

I Think the problem is, that modern FAH cores, like Core_21, wich currently does most of the GPU work are designed for Gaming cards. The FirePro 3D V7800 is AMD Cypress based, here is a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#FirePro_Series_(Vx900)

Cypres is the architecture used in the HD 5xxx cards from AMD. So theoretically Core_21 should work with your card, since the HD5xx are supported.

I have checked the "GPU whitelist" https://apps.foldingathome.org/GPUs.txt

Indeed there is a V7800 in it!

A up to date client should update this file itself. Check if this has happened. If not update your client and replace the GPUS.txt

If it still doesn't work try to manually ad your device ID and see if it works.

Dragon667 · October 24, 2018

Yea I looked at the text file in the F@H folder and the V7800 is listed. Oddly enough for testing purposes I quick through F@H on my home machine thats still (sadly) running dual HD6870's and it looks to be having the same issue. Maybe they stopped making WU's for GPU's of that age? Kinda dumb/weird though that they claim to support back to HD 5xxx cards, and yet it appears they're not making any WU's for them.

Metallus97 · October 24, 2018

1 hour ago, Dragon667 said:

Yea I looked at the text file in the F@H folder and the V7800 is listed. Oddly enough for testing purposes I quick through F@H on my home machine thats still (sadly) running dual HD6870's and it looks to be having the same issue. Maybe they stopped making WU's for GPU's of that age? Kinda dumb/weird though that they claim to support back to HD 5xxx cards, and yet it appears they're not making any WU's for them.

Ill get my HD 5770 out on the weekend and test!

I can't imagine them dropping support. Sure those old cards are super slow but OpenCL runs everywhere

And Alternative would be trying to run BOINC on them. At least put the power up to something good. Rosetta@Home also simulates protein folding on the GPU