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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bill1024

Member
Jun 14, 2017
88
73
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I just got deeply scared! I hope nobody finds a GCW prime. =:-O

I am sorry Stefan, my post was not meant to scare you. Something got lost in translation.
Full post was in the last ten years only ten GCW primes were found. And what was meant you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning or killed by a shark or hippo than finding a GCW prime
Not that a hippo or shark was under your bed silly man..
Nor that I did not want anyone to find a GCW prime. I hope some one does. But I got 10$ that says no one will find one this challenge. Very rare prime to find.
But thanks for stopping by the forum,. next time you're by don't be shy, post up and say hi!
 

TennesseeTony

Elite Member
Aug 2, 2003
4,204
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www.google.com
.....If it is like other WCG subprojects, it may magically reset its progress percentage shortly before the apparent finish. Do you have more info on it, beyond what "Research Overview" is showing?

No, no further info, (apart from the progress bar), but SCC dried up only a few weeks later than expected, and as Markfw and zzuupp have attested to, TB tasks are difficult to come by, so while there is currently a better supply of tasks, I'm not taking any chances. :)
 
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Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
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Well you never know, those land sharks can be anywhere
And I might be one of them!

KENNY_X02.jpg


Hm, maybe I need a new avatar? (of Kenny the Shark?)
 
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Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
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Dec 11, 1999
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Day 4 stats:

Rank___Credits____Username
9______2448804____xii5ku
14_____1774276____emoga
18_____1508692____crashtech
40_____661263_____Howdy2u2
48_____540887_____biodoc
56_____481844_____Ken_g6
66_____395784_____Orange Kid
120____176213_____zzuupp
252____26150______SlangNRox

Rank__Credits____Team
2_____16662507___Aggie The Pew
3_____13797393___SETI.Germany
4_____8275066____Sicituradastra.
5_____8013918____TeAm AnandTech
6_____5476174____Crunching@EVGA
7_____3258307____BOINC@MIXI
8_____2838516____The Knights Who Say Ni!

The star team seem to have gotten some assistance too.
 

TennesseeTony

Elite Member
Aug 2, 2003
4,204
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www.google.com
4_____8275066____Sicituradastra.
5_____8013918____TeAm AnandTech


This close race is making be pull out all three of my hairs!

Sigh............
....................TeAm. And all that..........
..................................................................ok, I'm partially in.
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
5,459
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We passed them at 05:45 UTC, they passed us at 06:15 UTC, and we passed again at 07:00 UTC.
Current scores:
4 ... TeAm AnandTech ..... 9,589,093.86 (1,069 tasks)
5 ... Sicituradastra. ........... 9,559,465.85 (1,062 tasks)
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,218
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Remember, if you set your clocks forward last night, the race ends "an hour" later than it started!

(And if you didn't set your clocks forward last night, maybe you should do that now? ;))
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
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And I'm even an hour later, with preliminary final stats:

Rank___Credits____Username
9______3576581____xii5ku
14_____2308646____emoga
18_____1896483____crashtech
38_____885175_____Howdy2u2
56_____679618_____biodoc
61_____608907_____Ken_g6
70_____507744_____Orange Kid
119____250641_____zzuupp
175____140203___10esseeTony
246____44415______SlangNRox

Rank__Credits____Team
1_____27195414___Czech National Team
2_____21201954___Aggie The Pew
3_____17870625___SETI.Germany
4_____10898417___TeAm AnandTech
5_____10511382___Sicituradastra.
6_____6867836____Crunching@EVGA
7_____4145780____Rechenkraft.net


Looks like, barring a lot of bad WUs, we're 4th! :D
 

Howdy

Senior member
Nov 12, 2017
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I show 1 "inconclusive" on my machine. I'm pretty sure it's the wing man since they have 5 invalids and my machine has none....
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
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That happens to me every once in a while.
Go to log in and it tells me iam allready logged in and iam not.
Thought it was just a firefox Glitch.
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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Hmm, TRP-LLR. According to my badges, I have run this before. But I haven't made any notes, nor have I stored any test protocols. . . . . . . . . OK, I must have run it in the previous TRP-LLR challenge in October 2017.

TRP-LLR's "current leading edge" (2.8 M) is between SR5-LLR's (1.9 M) and GCW-LLR's (3.81 M) / ESP-LLR's (3.84 M). I have outdated test logs of GCW-LLR, and logs of more recent and more systematic tests of SR5-LLR and ESP-LLR in the PG benchmarks thread.

I quickly looked around other people's hosts at primegrid.com, saw one with three TRP-LLR WUs from May, and they had (in chronological order) 896K, 896K, and 768K as FFT length. In August 2018, SR5-LLR was at 1152K, so that means TRP has about 80 % of the processor cache footprint of SR5. Strange; I would have naively guessed that a higher leading edge comes with a larger FFT length.

Edit: Wait, in June 2018 I noted 560K and 640K FFT length for SR5, which would also be in line with the optimum number of concurrent tasks that I found by testing in June. Maybe my later note of 1152K for SR5 is a mistake.

Edit 2: Saw another computer with 768K, 800K, 896K, 960K, 864K, 960K long FFTs in TRP-LLR WUs.
 
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crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,521
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Or is it AVX2? Haswell and up doing generally much better in PG than Ivy and below.

Somewhere I thought I read 7.5MB L3 per task for TRP, is this still subject to revision?
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
5,459
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Or is it FMA3 really? :-D
When I put a green checkmark under Tony's post, I read "AVX" as a general term for these. You are right that the LLR program notably benefits from the improvements in Haswell's vector units.

Edit: The FFT lengths that I observed in my spot checks yesterday translate to 6.0...7.5 MB FFT data size, which is good to keep in L3 cache entirely. As the subproject progresses to larger candidates, the FFT length may increase as well.