egpu support

[gfos]

Hello,

I was wondering whether egpus are supported by folding@home. I have a Mac mini with a plugged in sonnet egpu box and a Radeon Vega 64 but the client cannot find the gpu. Is it something I'm doing wrong? In case this topic has been brought up before kindly direct me to the threat.

Thanks in advance.

[ProDigit]

there have been reports on it working in the past.
I myself am waiting for parts to arrive, to see if I can drive an old laptop from the ExpressCard slot, with an eGPU.
Until then, if you're running iOS, there might be issues there. Linux could also have driver issues.
Highest chance of success, would be to try to run it from a Windows environment first.

I know EGPUs only work via Thunderbolt, or ExpressCard slots. Or if tapped off the internal PCIE bus.

[JimboPalmer]

The MacOS client does not support GPUs at all. In the past, there was a bug in Apple's OpenCL code, and the Pande Group has never gotten back to it.

If you were dual booting Linux or Windows and had the correct drivers for those OS's, then it might work, slowly.

[ProDigit]

eGPUs can still be better than folding from a CPU; and they're portable.
They could also add to CPU folding.

That being said, according to what I read, the ExpressCard slots are between 1/2 to 1x the speed of a PCIE 1x slot.
I think that's between GT 1030 and GTX 1050 territory (30-100k PPD).

I really think it's a pity, that until today, no egpus have been created working on USB 3.0 ports.
At best, USB 3.0 would be like a PCIE 2x slot (2.5x minus some overhead), and I estimate good enough for portable folding with a GTX 1050.

[bruce]

It's all dependent on drivers. As has already been said, there are zero supported drivers for OS-X and OpenCL, no matter how the GPU happens to be connected. On either Linux or Windows, some iGPUs are recognized since the drivers recognize them as the same model as the chip that's also used in a dGPU.

I've been looking for somebody running OS-X with an add-on dGPU that's supported on Windows or Linux who is willing to run a test, but those machines are really pretty rare. (ATI or nVidia, not Intel).

[ArneyViel]

Hi...I've been running Folding@Home on my egpu for a couple of months now. No issues with slowdowns or overheating as almost all the work is done by the gpu outside the laptop. Unfortunately there isn't a GPU macOS client, but windows bootcamp or Linux can be made to use the egpu.

medical pcb assembly

[PantherX]

Welcome to the F@H Forum ArneyViel,

Can you please post your log file. Ensure that you have copied the System configuration which is present at the start of the log file: viewtopic.php?f=38&t=26036