December 2013 Competitions!

[Dirk Broer]

The End of the year is in sight again! What do we use to help the year end gracefully?
First a carry-over competition from November:


November 29 to December 02 - [Season 1 - Episode 11-12 : Black Friday Crunch !]
Crunch with the best, or lunch with the rest !" : first season (vintage 2013) with 12 episodes issued by the french team "BRIGADE DU COSMOS" ! 1 episode each month consisting of 72 hours of challenge. The title of each episode will be in relation of the month challenge. For this eleventh edition : That's done ! Ison's Comet passed near the Sun. It's now time to make shopping after celebrating Thanksgiving ! Good weekend of shopping to all the US citizens and happy Thanksgiving to everyone ! Keep crunching ! Dufman leads here too -as he did previous Seti challenge-, before cov_route.

Black Friday Crunch chat and stats page


December 01 to December 08 - December Challenge
A MilkyWay@Home challenge issued by Team Belgium. Might want to re-launch my HD 4770 specially for this event...but then I have to park the GTX 650 in another box
December Challenge chat and stats page


December 01 to December 08 - Challenge (2) parallel with other challenges WITHOUT USES CPU¶GPU !
Those ever active Ukrainians -who can speak Spanish so well- have also organized a 2nd WUProp@Home challenge. WUProp is a so-called nci (non computing intensive) application that monitors how WUs of the various projects perform on the various hardware/software platforms. Just set and forget, the application runs alongside others with no perceptible impact on them. This time the challenge really runs parallel with another, so you can see for yourselves.
Challenge (2) parallel with other challenges WITHOUT USES CPU¶GPU chat and stats page


December 08 to December 09 - [Twenty Four 014] BDC Happy Birthday Crunch
Fourteenth edition of the serie of challenges between teams [Twenty Four] issued by the french team "BRIGADE DU COSMOS". [Twenty Four] serie of challenges aims to celebrate an important day of the History or of the year. 24 hours of intense crunch tribute to this day ! When this [TWENTY FOUR 014] will begin, it will be exactly 00:00 in France and we shall be the 09 december 2013. 24 months previously, the team BRIGADE DU COSMOS, my team, made his first steps on the SETI@home planet ! It was necessary less than 2 years for the {BDC} to become the team number 1 in France but also to raise itself in the international top 100. All these extraordinary performances made possible thanks to my teammates of shock who made of this team one of the best teams of the SETI@home project. Happy birthday {BDC} ! 2 years of crunch and we didn't say our last word. Come in large numbers to celebrate this event ! You're all welcome !
Happy Birthday chat and stats page


December 10 to December 11 - [Twenty Four 015] Doom Day Crunch
Fifteenth edition of the serie of challenges between teams [Twenty Four] issued by the french team "BRIGADE DU COSMOS". [Twenty Four] serie of challenges aims to celebrate an important day of the History or of the year. 24 hours of intense crunch tribute to this day ! For this [Twenty Four 015], we celebrate the video game Doom released on 10 december 1993 and created by id Software (John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack). Nobody will ever forget the horror-themed first-person shooter video game who launched the fashion of Doom Like. Pioneering immersive 3D graphics, it will be downloaded by 10 million people in the year of his launch. It's time to rerelease the game and make you a party of Doom. Kill some aliens ! :p
Doomday Crunch chat and stats page


December 10 to December 17 - Test new applications for Android
Those ever active Colombians -who can speak Ukrainian so well- want us to test Android applications and have chosen Seti@Home Beta for it.
Test new applications for Android chat and stats page


December 21 to December 25 - The December solstice - 2013
An Asteroids@Home challenge issued by Astronomy.Ru Forum
The December solstice - 2013 chat and stats page


December 21 to December 28 - Winter solstice - 2013
An Seti@Home challenge issued by Alaska Distributed Research
Winter solstice - 2013 chat and stats page


December 28 2013 to January 04 2014 - "Despite my age I don't live in the past, but in the future" 1st Rita Levi-Montalcini memorial
A Rosetta@Home challenge, issued by BOINC.Italy: All you Rosetta crunchers are welcome to join the first Challenge ever issued by BOINC.Italy, our tribute to one of the greatest, contemporary, Italian Scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini. A few words dedicated to her and to the Challenge in our community portal: http://www.boincitaly.org/component/...icle/2737.html Have a nice crunc! Rick!
1st Rita Levi-Montalcini memorial chat and stats page

[AMDave]

Excellent work as always, Dirk. Thanks.

[Jason1478963]

Thanks for the info. Did you happen to have any luck with the launching of the 4770's? I attempted a 4850 and failed to get it working.

[Dirk Broer]

I don't have a box with an OS capable of running a HD 4xxx series free at the moment.
Too much PrimeGrid on my Win7 box,
Win8.1 boxes won't accept old catalyst/SDK drivers for HD 4xxx and
Linux won't run the HD 4xxx series either for MilkyWay

So it's all up to my HD 7790 now...

For the 4850: Use a Windows<8.1, Catalyst 10.2 and SDK 2.1. I do hope there's an OpenCL 1.0 capable Linux driver out there, and an old SDK kit for Linux for your Mint boxes though.

Drat, it is worse than the mere version of the catalyst driver and/or SDK kit:
Users of Linux distributions with the latest versions of the Linux kernel and X.org's X Server will in future only be able to use the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series of Radeon HD graphics hardware with open source drivers. This is because version 12.4 of AMD's proprietary Linux graphics driver Catalyst (fglrx) doesn't work with X Server 1.12, which was released in March 2012. Although the recently published beta of Catalyst 12.6 is supposed to fix this, while also supporting Linux kernel 3.3 officially, it was announced in April that this version only works with the Radeon HD models from the 5000, 6000 and 7000 series, which are compatible with DirectX 11. This is the case for both Linux and Windows.

[Jason1478963]

Thanks again with the info as it helps the decision on what to do with these cards with full waterblocks.

As far as I can tell milkyway is OpenCL 1.02 and the 4xxx cards are OpenCl 1.0 capable. I think dad had luck running them on collatz with an older driver. I'm not sure they are worth running there either.

[Dirk Broer]

I ran MilkyWay on my HD 4770 until a week ago when Win8 updated to Win8.1, so MilkyWay ought to run on a 48xx card.
Using the older Collatz CAL/Brook++ application still works when you find the OpenCL application suffocating your system (as I frequently do!).

But here are some facts about old vs newer GPU archtecture:

Model	GFLOP SP	GFLOP DP	Tdp in Watt	GFLOP SP/Tdp	GFLOP DP/Tdp
HD 4830	736	147.2	95	7.75	1.55
HD 4850	1000	200	110	9.09	1.82
HD 4870	1200	240	160	7.50	1.50
HD 4890	1360	272	190	7.16	1.43
HD 4850 X2	2000	400	250	8.00	1.60
HD 4870 X2	2400	480	286	8.39	1.68
HD 4770	960	192	80	12.00	2.40
HD 5770	1360	0	108	12.59	0
HD 6770	1360	0	108	12.59	0
HD 7770	1280	80	80	16.00	1.00
HD 7790	1926	120.4	85	22.66	1.42
R7 260X	1971	123.2	80	24.64	1.54
R9 280X	4096	1024	190	21.56	5.39

The R9 280(X) still use the Tahiti (DP= 1/4 SP) chip, the 270 (X) and 290 (X) use the Curacao (DP=1/16 SP), repectively the Hawai (DP=1/8 SP), making the 280 and 280X the AMD cards of choice, MilkyWay-wise.
One might also consider the nVidia GeForce GTX Titan and enable the full Double Precision (DP) in its settings, so giving 1500 GFLOP DP at 250Watt Tdp.

[Dirk Broer]

December 09 to December 14 - The parallel challenge
A véry late entry by team Astronomy.Ru Forum for a Simap challenge.

[Nflight]

So Dirk
What challenges are we signed up for at this time and competing. I would like to contribute what little I can do?

[Dirk Broer]

So Dirk
What challenges are we signed up for at this time and competing. I would like to contribute what little I can do?

Einstein: up and running
Simap: Need to sign up
Collatz: SNAFU
Seti: up and running
Seti Beta: not yet begun