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

Posted on Thursday, November 28 2019 @ 15:08 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD
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


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



Loading Comments