The major problem with the Tesla cards is power. The second problem is finding a motherboard with suitable slots. We settled on taking an old PC (that had a fault on its motherboard) and reusing the case, disk etc. We used an Earthwatts EA-750 supply. The Tesla C870 needs two six-wire power connections – like an HDD. See picture.
The board has an NVidia graphics chip set. This has some interesting implications…
The operating system is Ubuntu 9.10, 64 bit. We have another Tesla card in a Windows system. The disadvantage of Ubuntu over other Linux distros is that there is little choice about versions of associated packages. I wanted gcc 4.4 because that includes OpenMP 3.0. Ubuntu 9.04 has gcc 4.3, which would have required a separate gcc build. The downside of this choice is that the NVidia CUDA examples don’t compile with gcc 4.4.
The OpenCL drivers and SDK (Software Development Kit) were downloaded from NVidia’s site. (Once you have registered, bookmark the page to avoid re-registering!)
To install the drivers, the X Window system needs to be off. So this requires a “safe” boot from the console.
I copied the SDK to /usr/local/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK
I put freenx on the system. It is possible to run OpenCL and CUDA examples remotely with freenx and with vnc (and with ssh login), but obviously(?) the graphics acceleration isn’t there.
leave a reply