PrimeGrid Challenges 2019

Page 13 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,646
4,589
75
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.
 
Last edited:

ericlp

Diamond Member
Dec 24, 2000
6,137
225
106
Definitely, the GPU is sucking down a lot more energy than the CPU is. I think it's a wash for a year or two old CPU. If you got really old CPU's then yeah... I wouldn't run them. I estimate around 575 watts at full load for both CPU/GPU.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
@StefanR5R , I can extrapolate from that information and this, that the HD7970 is probably even less efficient than a late model CPU?
"this" info was from before January 30 2019, when the GPU application was updated. (The update addressed the regression with newer Nvidia drivers, improved performance on the RTX series of cards, generally reduced CPU utilization, and introduced the -compute switch.) However, the relative performance between NV and AMD GPUs is apparently still in the same ballpark:
http://www.primegrid.com/gpu_list.php#AP27
Unfortunately, the mixed NV/AMD tables show only a small selection of GPU models -- maybe based on usage frequency? But coupling the info of the mixed table with that of the AMD-only table gives a wider picture.

BTW, here it is said that the Threadripper 1950X (14 nm, 180 W TDP) came close in throughput to the GTX 980 (28 nm, 165 W TDP) in 2018.
 

ericlp

Diamond Member
Dec 24, 2000
6,137
225
106
BTW, here it is said that the Threadripper 1950X (14 nm, 180 W TDP) came close in throughput to the GTX 980 (28 nm, 165 W TDP) in 2018.

Yeah I'm doing about 180,000 RAC on TR+1080. not too bad.... I could eek out a bit more, but that's conservative since I'm running on air.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
At PrimeGrid, RAC is rather meaningless IMO due to the mixture of subprojects with different performance characteristics on a given hardware.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
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)

PS, it's 4043 credits/task.
Hence: 2080 ~540 kPPD, 1070 ~250 kPPD, 1950X ~150 kPPD, 9900k ~87 kPPD
GTX 1080Ti, power-limited to 180 W (thus running at ~1.6 GHz):
100 tasks per day, 405 kPPD

That's 2.7 times the throughput of the 180 W TDP Threadripper 1950X.

Btw, on this power-limited GPU (and Linux, driver 384), the -compute switch does not change run times, or only within error of measurement.
 
Last edited:

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
624
126
On a few of my GPU'S, AP27
GTX 970-41 MIN.
GTX 980-31 MIN.
RTX 2080TI-7.5 MIN.
I think the 970 is near or on par with a GTX 1060'
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,646
4,589
75
Wow, I'm top of a leaderboard for once! No, not the challenge leaderboard:

Some early challenge finds:

Code:
+--------+-----------------------------------------------------+---------------------+-------------------+
| length | AP sequence                                         | time                | finder            |
+--------+-----------------------------------------------------+---------------------+-------------------+
| AP 25  | 81716791590567773 + 147817285 * 23# * n for n=0..24 | 2019-09-21 15:03:58 | Ken_g6            |
| AP 23  | 353121200310923071 + 4621999 * 23# * n for n=0..22  | 2019-09-21 12:21:37 | [SG]KidDoesCrunch |
| AP 22  | 276436758243573329 + 79175520 * 23# * n for n=0..21 | 2019-09-21 14:45:27 | [SG]KidDoesCrunch |
| AP 22  | 428880473219629679 + 4672232 * 23# * n for n=0..21  | 2019-09-21 14:20:32 | Venec             |
| AP 22  | 419611912680539107 + 4718334 * 23# * n for n=0..21  | 2019-09-21 13:59:05 | tng*              |
| AP 22  | 439183435716711233 + 4685504 * 23# * n for n=0..21  | 2019-09-21 13:36:15 | Venec             |
| AP 22  | 434060440857267571 + 4690814 * 23# * n for n=0..21  | 2019-09-21 13:34:08 | Renix1943         |
| AP 22  | 481832724450003337 + 4547943 * 23# * n for n=0..21  | 2019-09-21 11:38:11 | synopsis          |
+--------+-----------------------------------------------------+---------------------+-------------------+

I've never found anything bigger than an AP23 before! :)
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
@crashtech, what @biodoc said. With a single task per GPU, shader utilization on the GPU should already be near 100 %. Furthermore, unlike in some other applications, there are no periods during which the task needs to run on the CPU which would leave the GPU idle.

Well, actually I don't know whether AMD GPUs are ~100 % busy with one task at once; but it's that way with NV GPUs.
 
Last edited:

ericlp

Diamond Member
Dec 24, 2000
6,137
225
106
I'm running 1 task per card and they are all nvidia. I had to cap the power on the 1080Tis because they were running super hot. GPU usage on all cards is above 97%.


What kinda 1080 do you have? I just precision X --- swap up the fan profile a bit, to keep it cooler at about 69C.

As far as "tasks that count" yeah, it will clear the que in a day... so... just gonna let it do it's thing. :) Unlike seti, when you let prim grid get 10 days worth of work, you really get 10 full days.... So I just paired mine down to 1 day so not to get such a large que.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,574
10,211
126
Well, I'm in, thus far on 2x PCs, each with 2x AMD GPUs. One Ryzen R5 3600, RX 580 (6+8 pin), RX 470 (8-pin), and another with a G4560, and 2x 8GB RX 570 (8-pin ea.).
Not sure how effective the G4560 is going to be at driving the GPUs, when it itself has 4 threads and 4 CPU AP7 tasks to attend to. I wish there were some way to specify not to run CPU tasks, but ONLY GPU tasks in BOINC. (Yeah, I know, there's probably a way, but it's too complicated for me to look up right now.)

I've still got a few PCs to borg (my own), with GTX 1660 ti cards in them. When I get un-lazy enough to get up out of my chair, and stand up in front of those PCs for 5 min. each to install BOINC and set up PrimeGrid. (Oh my back. :( )

Edit: Yikes, after 15min or more, my R5 3600 is @ 90C, my RX 580 is @ 92C, and my RX 470 (bottom-most card, shouldn't get too hot), is @ 86C. Those are all the max temps in HWMonitor.

Edit: And the secondary rig with the G4560 was powered-off somehow. Maybe PSU tripped. It's only a 600W EVGA Bronze. It's fine for mining with dual RX 570 (each 8-pin) though. Maybe PrimeGrid's too much for it. Will keep an eye on it. No puffs of magic smoke coming out, thankfully.

Edit: This is WITH the 2x RX 570 box using a Power Limit of -10%, and WITH a power limit of -10% on the RX 580. Sheesh.

Edit: Earlier, I took the 2x 8GB RX 570 cards off of BOINC / PrimeGrid, since the PC powered-down doing that AGAIN. So now, that PC is back on mining duty, and I just switched over a Ryzen R5 1600 / 16GB DDR4 / GTX 1660 ti to BOINC / PrimeGrid. Hopefully that helps. If that goes smoothly, I might switch the other PC too. Still need to mine a little (maybe?).
 
Last edited:

biodoc

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2005
6,332
2,243
136
What kinda 1080 do you have? I just precision X --- swap up the fan profile a bit, to keep it cooler at about 69C.

I capped the power at 190 watts on my 2 1080Ti's. My rig with the dual 1080's is fine.

EDIT: I'm running linux so I don't have those eyecandy apps that you Windows guys have. :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: ericlp

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
I wish there were some way to specify not to run CPU tasks, but ONLY GPU tasks in BOINC.
Outside of BOINC, it's simple:

Go to www.primegrid.com, Your account, PrimeGrid preferences, Edit PrimeGrid preferences. There, deselect "Use CPU" at the top (unless you want to sieve on the side), but more importantly, deselect "CPU" in the AP27 row of the subprojects table. Then scroll to the bottom of the page, deselect "Send work from any subproject...", and apply "Update preferences".

Inside BOINC, it's probably very complicated. I suspect the only way is via app_info.xml, a.k.a. anonymous platform.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,574
10,211
126
Outside of BOINC, it's simple:

Go to www.primegrid.com, Your account, PrimeGrid preferences, Edit PrimeGrid preferences. There, deselect "Use CPU" at the top (unless you want to sieve on the side), but more importantly, deselect "CPU" in the AP27 row of the subprojects table. Then scroll to the bottom of the page, deselect "Send work from any subproject...", and apply "Update preferences".

Inside BOINC, it's probably very complicated. I suspect the only way is via app_info.xml, a.k.a. anonymous platform.
Yeah, but I want CPU computing on my Ryzen R5 3600 PC, just not that one specific PC. I guess I'd have to break down to using different locations, "Mars", "Pluto", etc.
 
  • Like
Reactions: crashtech

ericlp

Diamond Member
Dec 24, 2000
6,137
225
106
EDIT: I'm running linux so I don't have those eyecandy apps that you Windows guys have. :)

If only...they made hwinfo64 for linux. So how fast are you running a WU? I was funking with the OC got it up to 1960 mhz @ 75C ... I think it was down in the 12.5 min range. If I leave my card on presets it's around 1885 at 69~70C so... and is 13 min. I suppose if I water cooled everything... I'd be OC everything. But doing that eats up a lot of power...currently about 110 watts.
 
Last edited:

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
6,600
10,402
136
I was funking with the OC got it up to 1960 mhz @ 75C ... I think it was down in the 12.5 min range. If I leave my card on presets it's around 1885 at 69~70C so... and is 13 min. I suppose if I water cooled everything... I'd be OC everything. But doing that eats up a lot of power...
The 1080TIs which I limited to 180 W take an average of 862 seconds per task.
(Sample size 20, coefficient of variation 0.5 %.)
180 W * 862 s / task = 155 kJ / task (GPU consumption)​

I assume the card which you ran at defaults took near 250 W, say 230 W.
230 W * 13*60 s / task = 180 kJ / task (GPU consumption)​

PS,
of course the GPU's power consumption isn't all what it takes to get the job done. I have two GPUs in a Z270 based computer with platinum PSU. Running GPU jobs only, both GPUs set to 180 W board power limit, this computer pulls ~415 W at the wall.
415 W * 862 s / 2 tasks = 180 kJ / task (total consumption)​
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: biodoc

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,646
4,589
75
Day 1-ish stats:

Rank___Credits____Username
10_____4107688____phoenicis
22_____2575391____biodoc
27_____2296424____Lane42
32_____1977027____Howdy
55_____1204814____crashtech
72_____929890_____xii5ku
73_____917761_____Orange Kid
108____477074_____emoga
115____452816_____Modular
115____452816_____EricLP
123____412386_____SlangNRox
157____278967_____VirtualLarry
173____234494_____Ken_g6
314____36387___10esseeTony

Rank__Credits____Team
2_____31608174___Sicituradastra.
3_____20150312___SETI.Germany
4_____18921240___[H]ard|OCP
5_____16353935___TeAm AnandTech
6_____14724606___Aggie The Pew
7_____11607453___Storm
8_____9820447____Antarctic Crunchers

Wow, has everybody upgraded their video cards except me?