PrimeGrid Equinox Challenge March 17-22 11:02 UTC

[Ken g6]

Welcome to the first PPS LLR challenge of the year. This is your best chance all year to find a top-5000 prime during a race! And hopefully, with their new cloud servers, PrimeGrid can keep their system online this time around.

What you need:

• One or more fast x86 processors. (Even slow ones will do!)
• Windows, Linux, or MacOS 10.4+.
• BOINC, attached to PrimeGrid (http://www.primegrid.com/).
• Your PrimeGrid Preferences with only "Proth Prime Search (LLR)" selected in the Projects section.

What may help:

• An Intel processor with AVX may be 20-50% faster than with the default application. Sadly, that does not include Pentium processors or any AMD processors.
• A 64-bit OS. The latest applications are slightly faster, though most computation doesn't use 64-bit integers.
• To start the race on time. This race runs from 17 March 2013 11:02 UTC to 22 March 2013 11:02 UTC.
• Tracking your stats with my user script. It won't improve your stats, but it lets you see them. Click any of my user stats URLs to use it.

What won't help (but won't hurt either):

• A large amount of RAM. Faster RAM might help, but that's doubtful too.

What won't help (and will hurt, sort of):

• Unstable processors. (Invalid work will be deducted! If Prime95 worked recently on your processor, it's stable.)
• Work not downloaded and uploaded within the challenge. (It's not counted.) Should you not be able to be in front of one or more computers at that time, just set their 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. [post=29529001]My race starting script[/post] for Linux may also be working, but it's not well tested lately.

Welcome and good luck to all!

 

[somethingsketchy]

I'm in.

 

[zzuupp]

Count me in as well.

 

[biodoc]

me too.

 

[petrusbroder]

Sorry, not me. I have not yet started my "farm".

 

[QuietDad]

4 cores just coming off WCG just got pointed at it. They needed SOMETHING to do.

 

[blckgrffn]

All my intel cores belong to this

Is AVX available in OS X 10.8? I suppose there is only one way to find out...

 

[StitchExperimen]

I need the "name" of the project for the app_config.xml file so I can set the max threads it can use. It might have (LLR) in it for the specific type.

<app_config>
<app>
<name>???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????</name>
<max_concurrent>10</max_concurrent>
</app>
</app_config>

 

[StitchExperimen]

llrPPS is the answer.

 

[Kiska]

Unfortunately these take hours so I will chuck 1 or 2 cores in. Thats about the best I can do. GPU might get chucked in. Sorry.

 

[Ken g6]

Unfortunately these take hours so I will chuck 1 or 2 cores in. Thats about the best I can do. GPU might get chucked in. Sorry.

Hours? Your computer seems to have done nothing but Genefer tasks. PPS LLR tasks are much faster. On my machine they generally take less than one hour, and always less than two.

Edit: And the GPU only works for Genefer work.

 

[GLeeM]

Yikes! This starts tomorrow morning at 6:02 Central time. And only on CPUs.

 

[Ken g6]

Yep, it's too early in the morning for me to be there to start it. I'll leave most of my computers running on PPS LLR all night with low caches. And maybe I'll set up network start and stop times.

Edit: I think it's 5:02 Mountain - 6:02 Central!

 

[zzuupp]

Yep, it's too early in the morning for me to be there to start it. I'll leave most of my computers running on PPS LLR all night with low caches. And maybe I'll set up network start and stop times.

Edit: I think it's 5:02 Mountain - 6:02 Central!

Same here. My cache is at 0.01 & PPS LLR is the only CPU task that allows new work.

 

[geecee]

You've got 50% of my currently running cores, or as close to that as the scheduler allows. Let me know if you need/want more. I have an X6 box that I could fire up as well, but PG always scares me on that one, as the CPU temps always go up to ~60C (for WCG, it usually hovers around 50-52C on that box).

 

[Icecold]

Anybody else having issues getting WU's? I have a couple boxes that just keep telling me no work is available, and even on the ones that are getting WU's it seems pretty sporadic.

 

[biodoc]

I think they're having windows 8 problems again. My windows 8 machine was borking WUs at a high rate so I rebooted into linux and everything is ok now.

 

[Ken g6]

Tentative 6-hour stats:

Rank___Credits____Username
92_____18032______biodoc
206____6680_______wayliff
207____6673_______zzuupp
224____5918_______Icecold
231____5540_______Ken_g6
235____5322_______GLeeM
280____3868_______geecee
303____3365_______Lane42
329____2782_______Ryan
340____2623_______mike656
373____2127_______Geoff
423____1509_______kb3edk

Rank__Credits____Team
17____98844______Crunching@EVGA
18____95501______Keep The Fire Alive!
19____81792______Nemesis Germany
20____64444______TeAm AnandTech
21____58138______BOINC@Heidelberg
22____51839______L'Alliance Francophone
23____41681______USA

Why tentative?

SCORING FORMULA CHANGE

It's been brought to my attention that there's a discrepancy in the challenge points being awarded to the shorter PPSE workunits and the longer PPS workunits.

Historically, for at least as long as I've been here, PrimeGrid has used the "prime score" formula for our LLR-based challenges.

This formula, although much, much better than using the old BOINC credit function, actually is not a very good formula to use during challenges. In particular, it favors larger tasks too much. (It's harder to find larger primes, and this formula is based on finding primes, not the time spent crunching the numbers.)

Therefore, I'm going to change the challenge formula to something more similar to the new credit function, so that it accurately represents the amount of work done. This change will be retroactive to the beginning of the challenge.

The raw number of challenge points everyone has will likely go up or down, en masse, once the change is made, but the relative positions shouldn't change much.

I don't like to change the rules in the middle of the game, but this is necessary to keep the challenge fair and have everyone playing on a level playing field.

Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Also good to see some people finally passing me. For awhile I was in second place, which would be nice except I don't have that much computing power.

 

[GLeeM]

Also good to see some people finally passing me. For awhile I was in second place, which would be nice except I don't have that much computing power.

Same here!

LOL - I was in first place forty minutes after the start.

I was up early and got started at 6:04

 

[StitchExperimen]

I'm there as StitchExperimen
SUCK my computer was off-line
now I'm doing 14 cores at 3.1 GHz

 

[blckgrffn]

I am in - better late than never, I suppose.

 

[StitchExperimen]

at #818 is Waffleironhead 171.51 on our team

I found me now (This is my first race.)

SlangNRox is at 685 555.52

By my pen and paper math I think we can have 11th place.

 

[blckgrffn]

I've got 18 Intel/AVX cores pounding away at this. AVX evidently works pretty well on Mac OS

I am little bit mystified at why the mildly OC'd 2500k is doing so poorly compared to the stock clocked 3570k - I can't believe it is that big of a difference (~20%+?) 400s vs 500s on the smaller WU.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Anybody else having issues getting WU's? I have a couple boxes that just keep telling me no work is available, and even on the ones that are getting WU's it seems pretty sporadic.

I just set it up, and I'm not getting any work either. Bummer.

Edit: Finally getting work.

 

[Ken g6]

Try unchecking the checkboxes to use NVIDIA/ATI GPUs. I've heard good results from people who only have the CPU box checked, and that's how I've been running this race the whole time.

Say, I should post some post-12-hour stats:

Rank___Credits____Username
77_____63447______biodoc
103____50243______blckgrffn
159____31283______StitchExperimen
163____29923______Icecold
199____23945______wayliff
207____22570______zzuupp
225____20450______geecee
254____15398______Ken_g6
298____12137______Geoff
338____10025______mike656
349____9688_______Lane42
379____8471_______GLeeM
397____7411_______Ryan
421____6324_______kb3edk
529____3138_______waffleironhead
618____1901_______SlangNRox

Rank__Credits____Team
13____449903_____Russia
14____441139_____SETI.USA
15____392926_____Duke University
16____316364_____TeAm AnandTech
17____288167_____Team China
18____264399_____Crunching@EVGA
19____255368_____Keep The Fire Alive!

We've got a nice turnout!