NVIDIA Titan V vs Titan Xp Preliminary Machine Learning and Simulation Tests

NIVIDA announced availability of the the Titan V card Friday December 8th. We had a couple in hand for testing on Monday December 11th, nice! I ran through many of the machine learning and simulation testing problems that I have done on Titan cards in the past. Results are not the near doubling in performance of past generations… but read on.

Install Ubuntu 16.04 or 14.04 and CUDA 8 and 7.5 for NVIDIA Pascal GPU

You got your new wonderful NVIDIA Pascal GPU … maybe a GTX 1080, 1070, or Titan X(P) … And, you want to setup a CUDA environment for some dev work or maybe try some “machine learning” code with your new card. What are you going to do? At the time of this writing CUDA 8 is still in RC and the deb and rpm packages have drivers that don’t work with Pascal. I’ll walk through the tricks you need to do a manual setup of CUDA 7.5 and 8.0 on top of Ubuntu 16.04 or 14.04 that will work with the new Pascal based GPU’s

NVIDIA Titan GPUs (3 generations) – CUDA 8 rc performance on Ubuntu 16.04

I have a Titan Black, Titan X (Maxwell) and a new Titan X (Pascal) in a system for a quick CUDA performance test. Install is on Ubuntu 16.04 with CUDA 8.0rc. We’ll look at nbody from the CUDA samples code and NAMD Molecular Dynamics. It is stunning to see how much the CUDA performance has increased on these wonderful GPU’s in just 3 years.

NAMD Molecular Dynamics Performance on NVIDIA GTX 1080 and 1070 GPU

The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPU’s are out and I’ve received a lot of questions about NAMD performance. The short answer is — performance is great! I’ve got some numbers to back that up below. We’ve got new Broadwell Xeon and Core-i7 CPU’s thrown into the mix too. The new hardware refresh gives a nice step up in performance.

Molecular Dynamics Performance on GPU Workstations — NAMD

Molecular Dynamics programs can achieve very good performance on modern GPU accelerated workstations giving job performance that was only achievable using CPU compute clusters only a few years ago. The group at UIUC working on NAMD were early pioneers of using GPU’s for compute acceleration and NAMD has very good performance acceleration using NVIDIA CUDA. We show you how good that performance is on modern Nvidia GPU’s

CentOS 7 kernel boot order bug

I have been butting heads with a particularly annoying bug that I hit frequently on installs since I work with systems that need to have kernel modules recompiled for CUDA and the Xeon Phi. I have it mostly figured out and have a fix in this post.