PrimeGrid Challenges 2019

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Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
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Current challenge: Prime Sierpinski Problem (PSP) LLR, December 12-21 (04:19 UTC)

Happy new year! Here's the (tentative) list of this year's PrimeGrid challenges:

Code:
#  Date             Time UTC  Project  Duration  Challenge
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1   7-22 January    05:43:00  SoB-LLR  15 days   Conjunction of Venus & Jupiter Challenge
2   5-10 March      18:00:00  GCW-LLR  5 days    Year of the Pig(ging out on our CPU cycles :P) Challenge
3  24-31 May        00:00:00  TRP-LLR  7 days    Hans Ivar Riesel's 90th Birthday Challenge
4  15-20 July       20:17:00  PPS-LLR  5 days    50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing Challenge
5   3-10 August     00:00:00  ESP-LLR  7 days    Lennart Vogel Honorary Challenge
6  21-26 September  11:00:00  AP27     5 days    Oktoberfest Challenge
7  10-15 October    18:00:00  PPS-DIV  5 days    World Maths Day Challenge
8  24-29 October    00:00:00  321-LLR  5 days    50 years First ARPANET Connection Challenge
9   1-11 November   18:04:00  PSP-LLR  10 days   Transit of Mercury Across the Sun Challenge
10 12-22 December   04:19:00  GFN-21+  10 days   Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! Summer Solstice Challenge

What you need:
  • One or more fast x86 processors, preferably with lots of cores. (Even slow ones might do!)
  • Windows (Vista or later 64-bit, or XP or later 32-bit), Linux, or MacOS 10.4+.
  • BOINC, attached to PrimeGrid (http://www.primegrid.com/).
  • Your PrimeGrid Preferences with only the above project(s) selected in the Projects section.
  • Patience! All of these projects run long, slow WUs, at least on your CPU. As a result, no challenge is less than five days long. :eek:

What may help LLR (all but two of the challenges):
  • An Intel Sandy Bridge or later ("Core series" other than first-generation) processor with AVX may be 20-70% faster than with the default application. Sadly, that does not include Pentium or Celeron processors, or AMD processors.
  • In most challenges - probably all of these since their WUs are so large - it helps to enable multi-core processing with app_config.xml. Leave hyper-threading on if you do this!
  • Faster RAM might help on many challenges, as long as it's stable.
What may help in other challenges:
  • A GPU helps in two challenges.
  • Juggling in some extra WUs may help in challenges where you run more than one WU on the CPU at a time. (Or, switching to use all cores on one WU at the end may work equally well.)
  • Turning on hyper-threading may help.

What won't help (but won't hurt either):
  • A large amount of RAM.
  • Any Android devices.

What won't help (and will hurt, sort of):
  • Unstable processors. (Invalid work will be deducted! :eek: If Prime95 worked recently on your processor, it should be stable.)
  • Work not downloaded anduploaded within the challenge. (It's not counted.) Should you not be able to be in front of one or more computers at that time, there are several options:
    • You can often set BOINC's network connection preferences to wait until a minute or two after challenge time.
    • And for short work units, you can just set the queue level very low (0.01 days). This also makes it more likely that you will be a prime finder rather than a double-checker. But you might want to raise their queue size after the challenge is underway.

Welcome and good luck to all! :)

P.S. If no one has posted stats lately, try tracking your stats with my user script. With that installed, visit the current challenge's Team stats link for TeAm stats.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,389
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They have a list with relative GPU performance.
https://www.primegrid.com/gpu_list.php#AP27
According to that page, the GTX 1660ti is faster than a GTX 1070, and the same price new as a used 1070. I guess I'd rather have the 1660ti, but I'd rather have a 2070 Super over either one of those.
 

TennesseeTony

Elite Member
Aug 2, 2003
4,216
3,647
136
www.google.com
EDIT 2:Mark cured me with this: sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

original text:
Code:
Linux Mint 19.2 systems with GTX 1070 cards are immediately failing AP27 GPU tasks, driver 430.  I removed the spoofed coproc file and loaded the original coproc file, restarted, and still instant fail...any ideas?


EDIT What is the fix for this?:

<stderr_txt>

../../projects/www.primegrid.com/ap27_2.6_opencl_linux64: error while loading shared libraries: libOpenCL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

</stderr_txt>
 
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Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
25,627
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Linux Mint 19.2 systems with GTX 1070 cards are immediately failing AP27 GPU tasks, driver 430. I removed the spoofed coproc file and loaded the original coproc file, restarted, and still instant fail...any ideas?


EDIT What is the fix for this?:

<stderr_txt>

../../projects/www.primegrid.com/ap27_2.6_opencl_linux64: error while loading shared libraries: libOpenCL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

</stderr_txt>
Try this:

sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

I know I have seen that and I don't remember which was the fix.

Also
sudo apt-get install nvidia-opencl-icd-430

is a possibility.
 

TennesseeTony

Elite Member
Aug 2, 2003
4,216
3,647
136
www.google.com
AP27 tasks with one full thread of CPU:
(stock clock.)
credit per task once validated: 4,043.00

GTX 1080Ti on Win10 = 790 seconds or so ( 13 min +/- )
GTX 1070 on Linux = 3200 seconds :( ( 53+ minutes ) Ouch.
edit 1070 after reboot = 24-26 minutes
edit RTX 2080 Ti (not mine) = 522 seconds ( 8.7 mins )

I wonder if I've done something wrong, the 1070 shouldn't be 1/4th the speed...

edit: A reboot was not required after installing the OpenCL stuff, but after a reboot, the 2nd set of tasks for the 1070's 'only' took 24 and 26 minutes. Better, but still slower than I expected.
 
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Orange Kid

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,343
2,141
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1567295810936.png

A test run with 1070 on Mint 19.2.

1567296123863.png

A test run 2070 Mint on 19.2

430.40 drivers on both machines. The 2070 is on a 2700X and the 1070 is on a X6-1045 but both are 3.0x16 pci-e.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,389
10,072
126
and the 1070 is on a X6-1045 but both are 3.0x16 pci-e.
Hey, if anyone wants an Phenom II X6 rig, actually, your choice of two of them, for the price of shipping, let me know. Offer only to TeAm members, not to the general public. (Meaning, I want you to use it to crunch. It's mostly intended to be a GPU host. One of them has a K9A2 Platinum, a 4x PCI-E 2.0 x8 slot board. Could really get that grooving with some GPUs. The other is an ASRock 990FX Extreme4 board, with 3x PCI-E x16 slots, I think x16/x16/x4, not certain, could be x8/x8/x4.)

Edit: Both have Phenom II x6 1045T 2.8/3.2(Turbo) six-core AM3 CPUs in them.
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,257
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Bump for the next challenge, in about a week. I also changed the schedule to match recent developments. (There's an extra challenge next month!)
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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There's an extra challenge next month!
Is it because there are too few PrimeGrid challenges per year? Or to compensate for Formula Boinc downtimes?

Wait, I got it: The purpose of this new, only 5 days short PG challenge is to decrease the average duration of PG challenges, because so many users complain that the challenges are too long.

:-P
 
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Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,257
3,855
75
Is it because there are too few PrimeGrid challenges per year? Or to compensate for Formula Boinc downtimes?

Wait, I got it: The purpose of this new, only 5 days short PG challenge is to decrease the average duration of PG challenges, because so many users complain that the challenges are too long.

:-P
It's because they have a new project that they want to jump start. I think.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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The initial estimation of the project duration was a few months. The next, improved estimation soon after was a few years. Maybe this updated estimation helped solidify an idea to add a new challenge for this project.
 
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ericlp

Diamond Member
Dec 24, 2000
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1568979440058.png

windows time with 1080ti and 1950x ... 1d 1hr per thread kinda taking a long time, but it will eventually complete them. Still the GPU is around 3X faster than CPU -- in this case anyway. Not bad tho.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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I definitely won't run it on CPUs. Electricity is far too expensive here for that.

-------
I'm not sure whether it was posted here already: There is an app_config switch which increases speed of the GPU application a little bit, at the cost of screen lag:
https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8426
Edit, post #1 contains the syntax for NVidia. For AMD it's the same except for opencl_ati_AP27 as plan class.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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No, but here are some random performance data for 12 and 16 nm GPUs versus 14 nm CPUs:

RTX 2080: ~135 tasks per day (source, Jan 2019)
GTX 1070: ~62 tasks per day (source, Jan 2019)
TR 1950X: ~38 tasks per day (source, Sep 2019)
i9-9900k: ~21 tasks per day (source, Sep 2019)​

So, it doesn't actually fare as bad on CPUs as I believed to remember.

PS, it's 4043 credits/task.
Hence: 2080 ~540 kPPD, 1070 ~250 kPPD, 1950X ~150 kPPD, 9900k ~87 kPPD
 
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