- 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:
What you need:
What may help LLR (all but two of the challenges):
What won't help (but won't hurt either):
What won't help (and will hurt, sort of):
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.
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 ChallengeWhat 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.
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.
- 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! 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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