8. BOINC Pentathlon

[vaughan]

Today I received notification of the upcoming 8th BOINC Pentathlon organized by our friends at SETI Germany.

Hi Vaughan, hi AMD Users,

Less than ten months have passed since the seventh *BOINC Pentathlon* came to an end. Now the Pentathlon is back to its usual date *from May 5 to May 19* and SETI.Germany invites all BOINC teams to compete in five disciplines at five projects for the eighth time.

This year, the stable and popular project World Community Grid is set for the City Run discipline, with only one subproject being considered for the Pentathlon.

The teams may enter their favorite WCG subproject and three additional project suggestions while signing up using the using the registration form at https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pe.../anmeldung.php until *April 27*. The suggestions will be taken into account in the project selection as described at https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pe...sciplines.html.

All information about the BOINC Pentathlon is available at https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/, while you can find the answers to many questions at https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pe...27_en_FAQ.html.

Looking forward to seeing you again at the Pentathlon!

Regards
pschoefer
SETI.Germany

So I need suggestions as to the WCG sub-project and 3 additional projects we, the AMD Users team, want to nominate.

I suggest:
WCG - Smash Childhood Cancer as it has lots of tasks and is a new sub-project
Primegrid - Sophie Germain or Proth Prime Search Extended LLR
Leiden Classical - only because it is based in Dirk's home town
Amicable Numbers - easy points from a GPU project

Rules:
The BOINC Pentathlon consists of 5 disciplines:

Marathon (CPU, 14 days)
Sprint (CPU or GPU, 3 days)
City Run (CPU, 5 days)
Cross Country (GPU or CPU, 5 days)
Swimming (CPU, 7 days)
Each team may suggest three projects and one World Community Grid subproject while signing up. The projects are assigned to the disciplines as follows:

Marathon
The project is set by the organizers.
Sprint
The project with the most votes that provides workunits with a quorum of 1. This may be a GPU project if no other GPU project got more votes.
City Run
The World Community Grid subproject with the most votes. The following subprojects are available:
FightAIDS@Home - Phase 1
Mapping Cancer Markers
OpenZika
Cross Country
The GPU project with the most votes. If this project has been chosen for the sprint, the CPU-only project with the next most votes that has not been chosen for another discipline is chosen instead.
Swimming
The CPU-only project (i.e. the project does not provide any GPU application) with the most votes that is not already chosen for another discipline.
CPU-only GPU support
Quorum 1
Cosmology@Home
Enigma@Home
LHC@home
NFS@Home
NumberFields@home
SRBase
VGTU project@Home
YAFU
yoyo@home

Collatz Conjecture
GPUGRID
Moo! Wrapper

Quorum 2
DENIS@Home
Stop@home
TN-Grid

Amicable Numbers
Asteroids@home
Einstein@Home
MilkyWay@home
SETI@home

Projects are not eligible if they

were chosen in last year's Pentathlon (Citizen Science Grid, PrimeGrid, Rosetta@home, theSkyNet POGS, Universe@home)
can not provide a sufficient number of workunits
support just a few operating systems
provide non-CPU-intensive (NCI) applications
use buggy or test-only applications
do not allow the creation of new accounts
do not support WebRPC
To keep it as transparent as possible, we will publish the suggestions of every team when announcing the final project.

[Dirk Broer]

I suggest:
WCG - OpenZika, as it has more tasks than SCC,
Primegrid - Generalized Cullen/Woodall (Sieve) as it runs better on AMD hardware,
SRBase - it pays better than Leiden and always has work (and it is in the matrix),
Moo! Wrapper - easy points, always work, even on AMD APUs (except on Ubuntu 16.04 variants and later).

[euphoriabuzz]

Sounds good. How did you do last year? I see it says last years projects cannot be chosen again so is Primegrid out of the running?

[Dirk Broer]

You could very well be right about that. It is not in the matrix....
Last year (2016) we ended as 26th.

[vaughan]

The matrix includes Enigma @ home in quorum 1 CPU projects but it has been out of tasks recently.

[Dirk Broer]

The matrix includes Enigma @ home in quorum 1 CPU projects but it has been out of tasks recently.

All my raspi's are running WEP-M+2 at the moment...

[euphoriabuzz]

So today I saw this notification which will affect the last few days of the challenge

On May 15, World Community Grid will begin migrating to IBM Cloud, as part of an effort to modernize and enhance our infrastructure capabilities. Our system will be unavailable for approximately 48 hours while the migration takes place, but otherwise the move will not affect most volunteers.

We will have to ensure we have enough extra days of work downloaded to cover this period. Could cause issues with uploads etc.

[Dirk Broer]

Pity you can't see what the other teams already have chosen as projects

[Tweeder]

I second the Smash childhood cancer. As for the others no real preference, but I like LHC@Home and DENIS@Home. I cannot really provide much comparison between the projects so I am open to branching out from my circle of safety!

[AMDave]

I like Dirk's choices for the same reasons, except, I'd like to second Tweeder on LHC as I'd prefer to forward LHC in lieu of SRBase.
I know LHC generally returns lower score than the other but there;s a lot happening at CERN at the moment from my reading over the past few months and the current work units can unfluence the outcomes of their current focus - more of a "live" influence than usual.
Forwarding LHC right now is significant if all of the teams jump on and push it forward.
I do keep in mind that they have run out of Wus in the middle of a contest before but if we (everyone) can run them out that would be a great thing for their current science initiatives which have been getting a lot of media lately.

Otherwise, I'm ready for whatever the committee selects.
I just got a PSS Redback 12U rack - it HUMMMMMMMs but temps are coming down so lets warm my house up this winter!
"UR UR UR" [Tim "the toolman" Taylor]