Throwing a core for the little guys!

[NeoGen]

Hey all

I recently got dual-quad-core system (that's 8 cores ) and joining that to my Phenom X3 (3 cores) and to my wife's old Celeron (1 core) I figured that with a dozen cores altogether I should do something I've always wanted to, that is helping out on the underdog projects.

So right now I have 1 core set for:
- Prime Sierpinski PRP
- Sierpinski/Riesel Base 5 Sieve
- Sierpinski Base 5 PRP
- Seventeen-or-Bust
- Korea@Home
- GIMPS

None of these projects is running on BOINC, they all have their specific client apps.

I also wanted to run...
- Euler (but seems to be only running through Yoyo@Home these days, the non-boinc part is stopped for a long time)
- Riesel Base 5 PRP (Either bad configuration by me or the project is not sending work at the moment...)
- Seventeen-or-Bust Sieve (it seems to have stopped running non-BOINC, should be part of PrimeGrid now)


...and I'm thinking of someday soon throwing a core at:
- DPAD
- NPLB
- Wieferich@Home



Anyone else running these projects?

[Dirk Broer]

You can try to unlock a core from your Phenom X3, gives you yet one core more to throw with (provided your mobo has an AMD770 chipset or better), at no extra powerbill charges.

[vaughan]

NeoGen - IMHO Weiferich is a waste of time. The points it awards are extremely low. There is some controversy as to if the Math it is doing is as efficient as it could be. Beyond at Ars Tech might be able to add further comment on this.

NPLB is a nice little community and they will be having a "race" soon We won't win against the mighty legions of cores that the Prime Search Team can muster but its still fun to see what our team can do.

Many of the Math projects you mentioned have become sub-projects of the PrimeGrid Project. It seems to have become the de facto repository of small Math projects where the Admins have decided manual testing is a bit tedious and they can let Rytis manage everything via BOINC.

[NeoGen]

I didn't know that about Wieferich, but I guess all projects have their pros and cons... And since Wieferich is using its own in-house built client applications and not very evolved and highly optimized apps like LLR, or the GIMPS software, it indeed may be several years behind in development relatively to efficiency of the code and other tricks used to get performance faster... so yea, I guess there may be a point in there...

But I won't complain about the points since the points should be the same for everyone, so for us to go higher we got to put some more muscle into it like the others above us did.

At this point I'm not even considering the usefullness or not of projects, because otherwise all prime searching projects could be objected against... I'm just trying to get some push on the projects in which we have very few or no people at all crunching.

I forgot to add one to the above list... I also put a core on ClimatePrediction.Net

[vaughan]

Fair enough.

You are right that the tasks in Weiferich are hard to crunch even for those teams ranked above us. But ... beware. One of the teams, I think it was someone from Team Norway, made the accurate observation that Weiferich actually change the number of points scored / earned for the SAME amount of crunching depending on how many people are crunching at that point in time, ie. if lots of people decide "let's run Weiferich" then the points per task is decreased. Totally illogical!

This was the main reason I stopped running it.

Yep, also right that there is little value other than "because its there" to run many of the Math projects, LLR, NPLB etc etc but its also good to give some spare CPU cycles to Non-Boinc Projects.

[NeoGen]

Hehe... that is funny... do the admins of Wieferich follow a sort of variation of the laws of economy? But in this case, when the demand is high, the "cost" of each workunit goes down instead of up, and vice-versa?

You gotta love it when people try to be original in all the wrong ways...

[Ototero]

Good for you Neo,
These non boink projects need our support.
I'm running both dnets, folding@home and nplb. Plus of course whatpulse