AMD Radeon RX 5700 GPUs may (temporarily) be banned from SETI@Home

It's been a while since we've last reported about distributed computing projects. Folding@Home and SETI@Home are perhaps the most well-known variants but I think crowd computing took a big hit after cryptocurrency mining became mainstream.

Anyway, the latest SETI@Home news isn't that the project finally found extraterrestrial life but that AMD Navi GPUs are polluting the database. Apparently, a bug in the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series OpenCL compute API ICD (installable client driver) is causing the video cards to generate inaccurate results. SETI@Home has safeguards for this, but due to the large number of Navi GPUs the incorrect results are able to beat the system if two Navi GPUs cross-validate each other's wrong numbers:

Since there are "many" Navi GPUs crunching the project cross-validating each others' incorrect results, the large volume of incorrect results are able to beat the platform's algorithm and passing statistical validation, "polluting" the SETI@Home database.

Therefore, SETI@Home enthusiasts are advocating for temporarily banning Radeon RX 5700 video card from submitting results until AMD comes out with a fix for this problem. The OpenCL compute issue has been present since the cards launched four months ago. Other GPGPU compute tasks may also be affected.

Via: TechPowerUp