PrimeGrid April 2017 Challenges

[KarmannGaz]

Looks like there's a crunching challenge already taking place on PrimeGrid, from BOINC BAM :
359

This will overlap with PrimeGrid's own Mathematics Awareness Month Challenge which starts in a few days (April 7th to 22nd), but I think credits will count for both anyway. Any PrimeGrid tasks will count for the BAM challenge, but only PSP LLR ones for the main PrimeGrid one, see http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=7358&nowrap=true#106544 (as it stands at the moment anyway, though it has changed and been moved from the original dates due to a big push on one of their sieve sub-projects, which seems to have had the related forum threads removed or hidden as I can't find much about that any more! Keep your eye on the main PrimeGrid web page for any last minute changes, but I'm hoping it'll go ahead as planned now.

I'll start getting ready for it tomorrow and let my other projects finish or suspend them with no new tasks so that PrimeGrid takes prime position again for the duration of the challenge. Feel free to join in if interested! :)

[Dirk Broer]

I am on my quest painting the silver PrimeGrid badges golden -and the golden ones pink.
https://boincstats.com/signature/902/team/14/challenge/sig.png

[vaughan]

The Prime grid Maths Awareness Challenge tasks are pretty large. Most estimate a day or two on my machines. So far I haven't returned any completed tasks.

[KarmannGaz]

Yes, I saw you were on the individuals table way above me, my fastest processor is taking about 4 days per task, but it's a quad core so I'm letting it do 4 at a time. Just got my first four completed and am currently at position 258, no doubt that will drop as others jump past me though. I'm hoping to end up in the top 300 this time, not just outside it like last time!
Team-wise, AMD Users have three people taking part in the challenge so far and we're in the top 20 anyway :

PSP-LLR: Mathematics Awareness Month Challenge (2017-04-07 12:00:00 to 2017-04-22 12:00:00)
Last update: 2017-04-12 07:15:05
Rank Name Score
1 Aggie The Pew 21273032.95
2 SETI.Germany 16258306.78
3 Sicituradastra. 11383871.85
4 Czech National Team 10901150.58
5 BOINC@Poland 4348916.03
6 Crunching@EVGA 3851015.64
7 TeAm AnandTech 2894988.90
8 BOINC@MIXI 2883070.04
9 Rechenkraft.net 2192553.30
10 US Navy 2 188333.79
11 Team 2ch 2171949.35
12 The Knights Who Say Ni! 1991978.07
13 AMD Users 1478689.87
14 Ukraine 1403308.47
15 LITOMYSL Boinc Team Cz 1174911.19
16 Christians 1135691.80
17 BOINC@AUSTRALIA 883056.87
18 BOINCstats 621994.53
19 PrimeSearchTeam 512559.36
20 Noobs Of Kryta (NOOB) 379844.35

Still 10 days to go though, I'll see how many more tasks I can squeeze in! :)

[Dirk Broer]

I am on my quest painting the silver PrimeGrid badges golden -and the golden ones pink.
https://boincstats.com/signature/902/team/14/challenge/sig.png
One silver golden (TRP), one golden pink (TRP Sieve)

[KarmannGaz]

Good idea Dirk :)
My computer is playing up, I reboot and it's ok again for a while, but so far it's ruined one task and delayed the others so that I will only get another one finished by the end of the challenge at best, meaning I'll be well outside the top 300 :(
Maybe next time.

[vaughan]

@KarmannGaz, is your computer running too hot? In BOINC manager you can lower the percentage CPU usage to make it run cooler. I have several machines that need this otherwise they just lock-up and become unresponsive. I set the CPU at 80 percent. If you run an Intel CPU with hyperthreading capability set the CPU percentage to 50% of cores so that the hyperthreading is bypassed. The tasks will crunch slightly quicker.

Final 9 hours in the PrimeGrid Math challenge and I'm as 29th having dropped two spots overnight! However, I'm anticipating my AWS instance will finish its tasks in the next 3-7 hours so I'll have a final surge to the finish line.

As a team AMD Users is now ranked 17th.

[vaughan]

Less than 2 hours remaining and we jumped to 16th place so we are ahead of boinc@Australia

[KarmannGaz]

Hi Vaughan, yes, I think it was probably overheating. I have a water cooler in there, but llr processing does tend to heat things up more than usual and i bumped up my cpu usage to 98% in an effort to try get my last few tasks through before the challenge finished. unfortunately, that made it crash more often, so rather than gaining anything I actually slowed things down overall, as by the time I realised and rebooted, it had lost several hours of valuable time. Annoyingly, I also just discovered that I can multi-thread these tasks by adding a few lines to my app_config, and had the last couple using all four processors (it's an AMD A3870K quad core), which means I can make one of them go 4 times as fast (approx) if I don't mind the other tasks waiting behind it. If I'd realised that sooner, I could have had my other box (AMD dual core) using both of its cores to squeeze an extra task in as well. Anyway, I know for next time, and glad to have helped the team jump up a place! I've backed off cpu to 90% now and it's running a lot cooler again while finishing off my remaining tasks, and been up for over 5 hours without crashing now. :-)