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I'm not too familiar with hardware side of computers so excuse the question if it's not phrased in the best way. Story is I bought this computer for the sole purpose of training machine learning models that normally take forever. I wanted to use a GTX 1070 Ti, so I got a Mac Pro 2009 to go with it. Okay, I use the computer for the first few days, no problem, everything's working fine until I finally finish my code to actually start training. I install the latest CUDA toolkit (10.0) from Nvidia's website and start the training, immediately my computer abruptly shuts down as if you just unplugged it and it won't turn on. I'll take it to a repair shop see what's wrong, it's either the power supply or the logic board but I'm curious if using CUDA could be damaging to the hardware like this. I don't want this to be repeated with the new hardware. If this is the case, are there certain requirements I have to meet to make sure this doesn't happen?

For context, there is another GTX 120 already on the Mac Pro, so I'm using multiple graphic cards.

Peyman Mortazavi
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  • No; Software cannot damage hardware. There might be, extreme edge cases that exist, but even in those edge cases the hardware failed due to hardware not software. While you can write CUDA code that crashes your system, just like any programming language, simple reboot will fix it. Now if the OS recovers from that crash is a different story. – Ramhound Sep 20 '18 at 12:17
  • @confetti - You can't overclock hardware with CUDA code. Hardware simply does not fail due to code, you might expose a hardware fault with a certain block of code, but it's still the hardware that is at fault. – Ramhound Sep 20 '18 at 14:01
  • I would argue that if you use software, and configure an overclock that is unstable, that isn't the fault of the software. I am a hardware guy, spent many years in that field, before migrating to software. However, this discussion is clearly outside the standards of the comment section, and I refuse to patriciate. – Ramhound Sep 20 '18 at 14:11

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It looks like it's related to the power supply, but not because is damaged. As I explained in another question, you may be asking too much for that unit.

Pre-mounted computers, like Macs, have a power supply that can manage integrated hardware. But if you change/add devices to it that use a lot of power (like high-end graphic cards), the power supply most likely won't be able to generate enough power to fulfill each device's needs, causing some (or even all of them) to fail.

Solution to this? Switch to a capable power supply or seek for an external power source to feed your card.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

dCarMal
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