UK BOINC Team Forum

PrimeGrid: PrimeGrid's 16th Birthday Challenge starts June 12

The fourth challenge of the 2021 Series will be a 5-day challenge celebrating the 16th anniversary of the launch of PrimeGrid on BOINC. The challenge will be offered on the ESP-LLR application, beginning 12 June 13:00 UTC and ending 17 June 13:00 UTC.

To participate in the Challenge, please select only the Extended Sierpinski Problem LLR (ESP) project in your PrimeGrid preferences section.
For more information, check out the forum thread for this challenge:
https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread. ... rue#150570

Best of luck!

Account > preferences> 4th project - highlighted as Birthday Challenge. CPU only! No bunkering!

Mike

Hi

Just done one to see how they run. Uses as many CPU cores as it can per work unit. I had it set to running 75% CPUs due to heat, still took 51,069.66 seconds for single WU (over 14 hours), actual CPU time was 475,169 seconds (132 hours, 5.5 days). So this is definitely a multi CPU and/or thread project.

Mike

If it takes more than 5 days to run a workunit, having it as the challenge project running over 5 days seems a little ambitious, (or something...).

Questions:

What is bunkering?

When should I allow my machine to download its work units? I've set no new tasks on most of my other projects, so will probably have drained the cached work.

In your sig, three league tables are shown cycling through. I see the team here does not appear. Why is that?

adrianxw wrote: ↑Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:18 pm If it takes more than 5 days to run a workunit, having it as the challenge project running over 5 days seems a little ambitious, (or something...).

Questions:

What is bunkering?

When should I allow my machine to download its work units? I've set no new tasks on most of my other projects, so will probably have drained the cached work.

In your sig, three league tables are shown cycling through. I see the team here does not appear. Why is that?

Hi

In this case, a single CPU running this project would take more than 5 days and would not count as the result would be reported after the end.

As no bunkering is allowed, only tasks downloaded after the start and reported before the end will be counted.

Bunkering is downloading lots of tasks but not reporting or uploading the results until a later date. Gives a bit of a boost in a sudden hit at the actual start of a challenge if allowed.

In the sig, the tables shown are for 'FormulaBoinc', a different site (https://formula-boinc.org/index.py?lang ... &year=2021). It shows the Top 10 in each league. As we're not competitively participating this year, we're not in the Top 10 of league 1, so not shown.

Mike

>>> a single CPU running this project would take more than 5 days

So,it requires to run multithreaded. Thus the number of tasks running has to be at least half of the processor count. Depending on the skill of the developer, that will mean inactive cores for some of the time, you can't build a multithreaded program without that effect, an ace coder can reduce it, but an average coder will waste a lot.

Forget it, not interested.

UBT - Mikee wrote: ↑Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:13 pm

PrimeGrid: PrimeGrid's 16th Birthday Challenge starts June 12

The fourth challenge of the 2021 Series will be a 5-day challenge celebrating the 16th anniversary of the launch of PrimeGrid on BOINC. The challenge will be offered on the ESP-LLR application, beginning 12 June 13:00 UTC and ending 17 June 13:00 UTC.

To participate in the Challenge, please select only the Extended Sierpinski Problem LLR (ESP) project in your PrimeGrid preferences section.
For more information, check out the forum thread for this challenge:
https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread. ... rue#150570

Best of luck!

Account > preferences> 4th project - highlighted as Birthday Challenge. CPU only! No bunkering!

Mike

Hi Mike

Thanks for the heads-up!

Sadly, only one of my hosts will take part:

My 16-core Xeon *will* take part and it is happily crunching away for now (though none will count until new tasks download after the official start tomorrow)

My 32-core won't as it suffered a recent power outage at work and when it rebooted it won't boot back into Windows (and I've not had time to figure out why ).

My quad core won't, as it is set to be running multi-threaded, but despite tweaking the PG project preferences, I've got 2 single-core tasks which are already running (as a test, prior to the official start) and both will take at least another 6 days to complete... ). They've already been running for the best part of a day so I'm not keen to "Abort" them !

regards
Tim

Hi all

The stats for this challenge are here:

All Teams:

https://www.primegrid.com/challenge/202 ... teams.html

60 Teams have credits, but UBT is not one of them

All individuals:

https://www.primegrid.com/challenge/202 ... users.html

204 users are currently listed but none are UBT members.


I completed 2 tasks BEFORE the start (to ensure I could actually run these tasks) but they didn't count.

I have 16 tasks on 2 PCs - as I have the 16-core up and running but the quad core will not complete it's downloaded tasks before the finish time (as it's a bit old and slow)...so we might at least get some credits on the score sheet (by the end), but nowhere near the top. Oh well...

regards
Tim

Hi all

We're now in 62nd place (out of 96 teams with credits) and have returned 13 tasks, for a credit total of 38,670.93

Members-wise, team member placings are:
out of 359 users.

Well done to all those taking part....still a day or so to go !

I doubt I can add to the teams efforts - My quad core is only about 50% of the way though the tasks it downloaded (before the Challenge) and my 16-core is nearly finished with some tasks...but I'm not sure they will complete before the deadline - they are just too intensive for my older generation CPU's.

regards
Tim

Hi all

Our final team position on this Challenge was:
This was out of 108 teams that took part.
A total of 422 members took part.

Sadly none of my tasks completed in time

regards
Tim