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Thread: Sophie Germain's Birthday Challenge

  1. #1
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    Feb 2017
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    Sophie Germain's Birthday Challenge

    Sophie Germain's Birthday Challenge is under way, ending 4 April 12:00 UTC.

    I'm struggling to stay in the top 300 with 3 machines running 20 cores on this one! Don't know if PrimeGrid has suddenly become popular, or just lots of people run SGS LLR as a default anyway.

    Vaughan is climbing up the individuals table, currently at 15th, and team at 16th with 6 of us taking part so far.

    http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=9086

  2. #2
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    Busy re-installing my PrimeGrid cannon...and you can say all kind of things about nVidia, but their video cards work instantly under Linux (as in displaying in high settings)
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 04-02-2020 at 03:40 PM.


  3. #3
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    Yes, nothing wrong with nVidia cards in my opinion, in some ways I wish I'd chosed one instead of the ASUS power hungry monster, but the price was right at the time.
    By the way, this particular challenge is CPU only, graphics card is sitting idling. Typical, as it's cold today and I could do with some more heat!

  4. #4
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    If it really gets cold I will try and restore my nVidia GTX 260, by far my most power-hungry card ever.
    Nowadays a GTX 650 is my most powerful nVidia card -might replace it with a GT 1030 if I get the money: better performance for less power.
    It is a pitty AMD has no discrete cards in that power category. A RX 5600 is a fine card, but too expensive in both purchase and daily use.

    I've set my i7-3770 to run the SGS WUs eight threads at a time, they finish in a mere 5 minutes!
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 04-02-2020 at 09:57 PM.


  5. #5
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    Dirk you will get more throughput running single-threaded for SGS.

    Try some reasonably priced computers from Rytis's server at The Science Cloud:

    https://thescience.cloud/

  6. #6
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    Oooh, thanks for the tip, I hadn't noticed SGS runs better single-threaded. I've just changed mine to do so and I now have about 20 finishing every 30 minutes instead of one every 12, quite a big improvement! Let's see if I can sneak back up to the top 300 in the time left...

  7. #7
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    Well that was an exciting finish!

    After a long fight with a couple of Czech National team members and hovering around position 15 for a long time, with a brief blip up to 11th then dropping back to 12th for what looked like the end, Vaughan somehow managed to whoop their asses in the closing few hours and shoot back up to get a top 10 place (i.e. 10th, lol), excellent effort! Recursive finished in a respectable 205th place, and I managed to climb back into the top 300 ending at 283rd. Dirk Broer did well getting to 398th place, considering his late start. Also well done to DannyRidel, AllenOut & Velociraptor01 for getting some results in, making the team end up with 14th place out of 164 taking part.

    Quite a gap to the next scheduled PrimeGrid challenge, 23rd June, unless they slot another one in before then.

    Back to normal crunching for a while!

  8. #8
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    I added another dozen Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz from The Science Cloud and with 2 hours to go I added 24 additional (to the 12 I already had) Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8124M CPU @ 3.00GHz from AWS.

    The reason I dropped from 11 to 12th was overnight I had to cut my own CPUs to 50 percent power as they were making my room so hot the a/c was working really hard. This made the a/c noisy and my wife complained. The drop in usage made the room temp drop 6C as the a/c unit managed to cope better.

    Near the end of the race this evening none of my home machines could get work as the PG servers got overloaded but after 30 minutes or so this resolved itself. I don't know what caused it and the PG Admins have been unusually quiet about it.

    Overall it was a fun race.

  9. #9
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    The tip really helped, I was able to finish just within the top-400 -after a late start


  10. #10
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    Mar 2007
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    In the states they sometimes spray a mist of water at the condenser to evaporative cool it for additional cooling/efficiency. It may be an option if you really want to push the farm for a short term. I'm not sure its a good idea to do consistently with the extra water usage. If my climate was right I would also like to try swamp coolers or evaporative cooling with home automation.



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