PrimeGrid Low Country Festivities Apr 29 - May 7

[Ken g6]

Hey, y'all, it's almost time for the Low Country Festivities!

Um, better make that the "Low Country" Festivities!

"The Standard Australian Square Dance"? Let's just call it a PrimeGrid race, OK?

Welcome to the second-most grueling PrimeGrid challenge of the year. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to complete as many Woodall LLR tests as you can, as quickly and correctly as you can. Because these work units take longer than most, you will have a full eight days, from April 29 to May 7, both at 18:00 UTC, to work on them.

What you need:

• One or more fast x86 processors. See below for the best kinds.
• All of those processors running stably. One good way to check that is to run PPS or SGS LLR for a few days. (Although Prime95 may be a more reliable test.) If you get any errors, your processor probably isn't stable at your current clock/voltage.
• Windows, Linux, or MacOS 10.4+.
• BOINC, attached to PrimeGrid (http://www.primegrid.com/).
• Your PrimeGrid Preferences with only "Woodall Prime Search (LLR)" selected in the Projects section.
• Patience! These are long WUs. (Not as long as Seventeen or Bust, but each will probably take more than one day.)

What might help:

• AVX on Intel i3/5/7 processors. It nearly doubles your speed.
• A 64-bit OS. (I think it helps a little with the latest version.)
• Fast RAM. (DDR3-2133 may be 10-15% faster than DDR3-1600.)
• Having hyper-threading off on i3/5/7s is said to help.
• Following [post=30943822]Ken's WU Juggling Guide[/post] toward the end would help too.
  

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

• A large amount of RAM.
• Any video cards.

Work not downloaded and uploaded within the challenge will not be counted. Should you not be able to be in front of one or more computers at that time, see the challenge strategy thread for ways to start and finish on time. (I think my Bash script for Linux is up-to-date, but I wouldn't guarantee it.)

Good luck to all!

 

[GLeeM]

"The Riesel Problem (LLR)"?

I think you forgot to edit this to say Woodall Prime Search (LLR)?

 

[Ken g6]

Yep, thanks. Every time I make a new thread for a race I find an old thread and modify it. This Riesel thread somehow came up in a search for "woodall".

 

[Icecold]

Does AVX speed this up on AMD processors that support it(Bulldozer and Piledriver) or just Intel CPU's with AVX?

 

[Ken g6]

AVX on Intel only, because AMD processors with AVX only have half an FPU. I keep forgetting AMD exists.

 

[StitchExperimen]

I'm going to pass on Low Country Festivities heat is one reason the furnace is still in use and another is to pull the numbers I did in the last race I pulled everything off of other projects to do it. (It was my first race and was fun!)

Also I pitched in 6 cores to redo computation wu's that were incorrect from cheating to help put them back on track on PPS (Sieve). When hcc1 runs out since PPS (Sieve) also uses ATI GPUs I'll crunch a month also.

 

[jaedaliu]

I'd like to participate. but, I'm not entirely sure how I can schedule the work units to download and flush at the right time.

windows 7

 

[Ken g6]

Probably the easiest thing to do is to wait until you're in front of the computer. This is an eight-day race - a few hours won't hurt nearly as much as not running the race at all. At that point you would just have to abort any work not downloaded during the race.

A slightly more complicated option is to go to Tools -> Computing Preferences and set a day-of-week override on Network Usage. If you set network access to 00:00-00:01 on Sunday, and (18-your_timezone_offset):05-00:00 on Monday, that gives you at least 24 hours offline before the race. (Set it a few minutes late in case your clock doesn't match PrimeGrid's.) Be sure to set your cache low in this case. If you can access the internet in that time you can change your PrimeGrid preferences to, say, PPS LLR now, and change back to Woodall in that time frame.

 

[jaedaliu]

This technique is to clear the input buffers before the challenge starts, then enable downloading work units once the challenge starts, thus making sure that I download and start working challenge material?

Sounds pretty straight forward.

 

[ljtatej]

Looks like I'll be missing this event entirely during the move. Good news is I found my 2600K in packing, so I know where it is when I set up shop. I didn't realize all the crud I've collected over the last six years!

 

[somethingsketchy]

I'm in. Hopefully I'll have enough VMs at home/work to make a difference.

 

[biodoc]

I'm in!

 

[GLeeM]

I don't know why I have so much trouble with time zones.

Does this start tomorrow - Monday - afternoon at 1:00 PM Central time?

 

[Ken g6]

I can never figure out time zones either. Just look at the PrimeGrid homepage. The race starts one day two hours and about ten minutes from now.

 

[Ken g6]

And we're off!

 

[GLeeM]

Because these work units take longer than most,

"Recent average CPU time: 74:11:45" for these WUs. That's more than three days!

My "Progress" is at 4% after four hours "Elapsed". I'll be lucky to get two sets (20) of WUs finished.

 

[Ken g6]

Looks like I'll get about 11 done with juggling - just under two sets. I knew these would be long WUs, but this is even longer than I expected.

But really the only way to know how long they'll take for you is to divide the time taken so far by the percentage done. E.g. 6 hours / 6% = 6/.06 = 100 hours.

 

[GLeeM]

Looks like I'll get about 11 done with juggling - just under two sets.

I'm hoping these early numbers are a bit off and we can finish two sets!

It is annoying to think that my CPU (i7 920 at 3.93 w/HT on) is 24+ hours slower than average
I guess I could turn HT off and get another four finished

 

[Ken g6]

It is annoying to think that my CPU (i7 920 at 3.93 w/HT on) is 24+ hours slower than average

Well, it doesn't have AVX, so that's why. Not that any of my machines have AVX either.

Having hyper-threading off on i3/5/7s is said to help.

 

[jaedaliu]

I did a poor job of trying to schedule the start =( gotta do some testing next time so I know what i'm doing.

When I checked my machine 5 hours into the challenge, 2 threads were on World Community Grid, and 1 was on PrimeGrid. I suspended WCG, and Primegrid picked up a previously downloaded work unit, then downloaded a new one.

Oh well, something is better than nothing.

 

[GLeeM]

Might be a little early ... I'm only about half way to sending results!

12 Russia ............... 75107.36
13 USA .................. 56750.88
14 TeAm AnandTech ....... 50281.40
15 Crunching@EVGA ........50065.23
16 Polish National Team ..44048.28


39 Geoff ...... 25511.62
56 SlangNRox .. 24769.79

 

[blckgrffn]

Holy cow, I missed the start of this by a long shot Spooling up now...

 

[biodoc]

Holy cow, I missed the start of this by a long shot Spooling up now...

Wondering where you were! Welcome to the race!:thumbsup:

 

[GeoffS]

Geez... 66000 in pending credit!

Might be a little early ... I'm only about half way to sending results!

12 Russia ............... 75107.36
13 USA .................. 56750.88
14 TeAm AnandTech ....... 50281.40
15 Crunching@EVGA ........50065.23
16 Polish National Team ..44048.28


39 Geoff ...... 25511.62
56 SlangNRox .. 24769.79

 

[petrusbroder]

Here are some stats to alleviate the stats-withdrawal:

Team Stats as of 2013-05-02, 17:15 UTC
Rank ____ Team name _____________________ Points ____
08 ______ BOINC@Poland ________________ 556 923.49
09 ______ Aggie The Pew _______________ 446 392.67
10 ______ BOINC@MIXI __________________ 359 116.84
11 ______ Nemesis Germany _____________ 275 868.05
12 ______ Russia ______________________ 226 127.14
13 ______ Polish National Team ________ 221 583.66
14 ______ TeAm AnandTech ______________ 207 237.79
15 ______ USA _________________________ 158 488.99
16 ______ Crunching@EVGA ______________ 144 930.73
17 ______ The Knights Who Say Ni ______ 100 551.57

60 teams in the race.


Individual stats as of 2013-05-02, 17:30 UTC
Rank _____ Name ____________________________ Points _
017 ______ biodoc ________________________ 125 486.51
065 ______ Geoff __________________________ 50 572.70
132 ______ SlangNRox ______________________ 24 769.79
194 ______ P _______________________________ 6 408.79

217 participants in the race.