We were donated a FireStreaam 9270 by the University’s computing service (iSolutions), who had been given it by AMD. This fitted happily into the PCI-e slot of a 4-year old machine. The 550W power supply is adequate. The existing (NVidia) graphics card was removed. The FireStream has a DVI socket.

The system is running Ubuntu 9.04, 64 bit. The current release of the drivers does not work with Ubuntu 9.10. (I tried!)

The drivers and SDK are available from AMD. The drivers cannot be installed in a live X session, but they can be installed using a remote login (and rebooting).

I put the SDK in /usr/local/ati-stream-sdk-v2.0-beta4-lnx64

If the drivers are installed correctly, there is an AMD logo at the bottom right corner of the console. But remote access is a problem. AMD provide an applications note. This requires some changes for Ubuntu. The first file to be edited is /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom – add the lines listed. In /etc/gdm/Init/Default, the line to be added is:

chmod uog+rw /dev/ati/card*

BUT, having done all that, logins using NX or VNC will not give access to the card. The only thing that works is ssh. Even ssh with X tunnelling fails! That’s fine if all you care about is numerical computation. If in doubt, ensure that the environment variable DISPLAY is set to :0.0. (Not localhost:0.0 – even that won’t work.) This can produce some weird results if a graphical app is run – it appears on the main physical display. (I have also tried shadowing the console with NX. It sort of works but it’s not really usable.)

One other useful tip. Create a file, /etc/ld.so.conf.d/opencl.conf with the line

/usr/local/ati-stream-sdk-v2.0-beta4-lnx64/lib/x86_64

(or whatever is appropriate). Run sudo ldconfig (or reboot). This makes the dynamic library available to any application – there’s no need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.