GPU processing

For recording how we get on with the experimental NVIDIA cards

Hardware

The Quadro FX 5600 fits nicely into the WoC midi tower cases (after removing the hard drive bay and relocating the hard drive in the floppy bay, where it's somewhat less than securely mounted so treat the hardware gently). We replaced the PSU with an Amtec 560W one to have enough power for the card.

Software install

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html

The CUDA toolkit I installed in my home directory, and then copied to the NFS server (the installer script does not do any configuration so this should be safe). There's a 'cuda' module to set the required environment variables (and a few others that I think will be useful)

The NVIDIA driver itself requires a bit more decision-making. The NVIDIA site says to install it via Yast, by adding NVIDIA as a package install source. This is against our policy of never mixing third party RPMs with the SuSE ones. So I installed the kernel source package

zypper install kernel-source

and then ran the by hand driver installation. The -e flag is great as it shows you exactly what's going on.

The install backed up and replaced a few libraries and things. This is a worry as any future SuSE update will trash this. I need a new version of the image without those SuSE libs to use on these machines. The kernel module got dropped into the running kernel's lib/modules directory tree, unsurprisingly. I am inclined to live with the need to update this by hand. The auto-patching script doesn't do kernels on 10.2 so it will always need a computer officer's intervention to do a new kernel anyway.

Not sure if the module will actually get loaded on boot; for the moment I've modprobed it. Does it even need loading on boot? Apparently yes.

The SDK is currently in /usr/local/shared/suse-10.2/x86_64/cuda/sdk and requires the 'cuda' module to be loaded.