BOINC should use all GPUs by default, instead of forcing user to set use_all_gpus to 1 in cc_config.xml

[JacobKlein]

BOINC should use all GPUs by default, instead of forcing user to set <use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus> in cc_config.xml

For instance, in my system, I have a GTX 460 and 2 9800 GTs. That's 3 very capable CUDA cards, but a default install will not utilize the 9800 GTs. Thus, a default install will ignore quite a bit of the processing capability of my machine.

I'm not necessarily saying that we need to design a GUI for it. What I am requesting is that the default settings should be to use all of the GPUs. For me, it actually took me quite a bit of time to find out that I had to set a crazy flag in a crazy xml file, to get BOINC to use all 3 GPUs. A regular user would get lost.

BOINC should not need to limit to "only running on a GPU that is equivalent to the best GPU in the system."

It should be up to the application requirements to decide if they can run on a given GPU device. The applications should [be able to?] check memory requirements, or clock speeds, or any other requirements, of a given GPU.

Note: This is similar to Ticket # 983 which requested to have the option be configurable via GUI. But, because GPUs can vary greatly in memory/clocks, like mine do, I disagree about making any GUI changes.

The default should be to use them all.

[Pepo]

If BOINC could be that smart, then if multiple GPUs are available, it could try to exclude (by default) the one bound to the (main) display, and note the setup in cc_config.xml accordingly, to be easily overridden by the user.

[JacobKlein]

I disagree.
The main display is usually the beefiest video card, and should not be excluded by default.

GPU processing should be controlled by the options that are present in the UI today... which work just fine, except BOINC only utilized 1 of my 3 GPUs by default.

BOINC should include all GPUs by default.

[davea]

BOINC (both client and server) currently supports N more or less identical instances of a GPU of a particular manufacturer. If there are non-identical instances, it ignores the less capable one(s).

Changing this would be a large code change that we don't plan to do soon.