PrimeGrid's 2020 Challenge Series

RFGuy_KCCO

DCOTM x4, [H]ard|DCer of the Year 2019
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The PrimeGrid Challenge Series is an annual competition based on the results of monthly challenges. The purpose of the Challenge is to spotlight a specific project within PrimeGrid's family of projects as well as to offer a little "healthy" competition for PrimeGrid's participants. It is also an opportunity for people to learn more about each specific project and have fun doing it. Below is a tentative schedule for 2020.

I plan to participate in all of the challenges again this year and it would be great if other team members joined in to help give the [H]orde a strong showing in the final results. Happy crunching!


2020 Challenge Series

Date Start Time UTC Project(s) Challenge Duration


24-25 January 0:00:00 321-Sieve International Education Day Challenge 1 day

12-17 March 6:00:00 SR5-LLR Year of the Rat Challenge 5 days

1-4 April 12:00:00 SGS-LLR Sophie Germain's Birthday Challenge 3 days

23-26 June 22:00:00 PPS-Sieve Top Gun Maverick Challenge 3 days

24-31 July 20:00:00 TRP-LLR Summer Olympics Challenge 7 days

3-6 September 0:00:00 PPSE-LLR International Bacon Day Challenge 3 days

20-25 October 6:00:00 PPS-DIV 2020 World Expo Challenge 5 days

18-28 November 18:00:00 CUL-LLR & WOO-LLR Magellan 500th Anniversary Challenge 10 days

21-31 December 13:22:00 GFN-18, 19, 20 Great Conjunction Challenge 10 days
 
This is where I'll be putting all of my effort this year. Not even sure about the pent... I'll see how I feel.
 
FYI the International Bacon Day Challenge kicks off tomorrow.

The sixth challenge of the 2020 Series will be a 3-day challenge celebrating the day arbitrarily chosen by three graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder to celebrate this notorious breakfast meat. The challenge will be offered on the PPSE-LLR application, beginning 3 September 00:00 UTC and ending 6 September 00:00 UTC.

This translates to 5PM PST or 8PM EST for those that are not UTC savvy.

This is only the specific Sub project PPSE-LLR and multithreading is NOT recommended.
 
Our team is currently sitting in 5th place for team ranking in the challenge series this year. Challenge series tracks both team and individual competitions. Good time to get badges in various PG sub projects if you have not run them before.
 
Well done guys! Finished 7th overall in team standing.

Individual stats:

RankNameScoreTasks
10​
EXT643 307 647.9055 647
16​
RFGuy_KCCO2 355 385.8739 633
29​
motqalden1 220 686.2220 536
148​
wareyore177 179.182 981
213​
skylaar84 937.601 432
293​
Priller35 009.06589
 
If it had been a bit cooler I would have been able to put way more into the comp.

EXT64 and RFGuy_KCCO tho with those massive "personal datacenters" lol
 
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Yeah, it cooled off a bit, but my AC was still none too happy. You can really feel the extra heat PG with AVX pushes out.
 
This kicked off today and is in progress for the next 10 days :

Welcome to Magellan's 500th Anniversary Challenge!


The eighth challenge of the 2020 Series will be a 10-day challenge commemorating the (approximate) 500th Anniversary of the extraordinary expedition of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. The challenge will be offered on the CUL-LLR and WOO-LLR subprojects, beginning 18 November 18:00 UTC and ending 28 November 18:00 UTC.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Ferdinand Magellan (3 February 1480 – 27 April 1521) began a historic journey to circumnavigate the globe. Simple, right? Not really— the explorer and his voyage are a study in contradiction. Magellan was Portuguese, but sailed on behalf of Spain. He was a formidable captain, but his crew hated him. His expedition was the first to sail around the world, but he didn’t end up circling the globe himself. His name wasn’t even Magellan.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519 expedition changed the world forever. His journey was “the greatest sea voyage ever undertaken, and the most significant,” says historian Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. “That’s not hyperbole.”

Brutal, bellicose, and brave, Magellan turned a commercial voyage into a hair-raising showdown with a wide world few Europeans could imagine. At the beginning of his journey, his contemporaries suspected it was impossible to sail around the entire globe—and feared that everything from sea monsters to killer fogs awaited anyone foolhardy enough to try. “It sounded suicidal to do this,” says Bergreen.

For more, check out this fantastic biography: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/09/magellan-first-sail-around-world-think-again/

To participate in the Challenge, please select only the Cullen Prime Search LLR (CUL) and/or Woodall Prime Search LLR (WOO) projects in your PrimeGrid preferences section.
 
Congratulations on taking 8th place! Long tasks are so much harder to manage during these events. Well done!

If you are bored and your GPU is idle...You could always help rescue TAAT from the clutches of the 'evil' TBST/XS conglomerate during the current FB Sprint, project Amicable Numbers. :D

It seems only stoneageman of XS has NOT switched to TBST (a lot of back and forth with others, such as SystemViper) https://stats.free-dc.org/team/ami/270
 
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Congratulations on taking 8th place! Long tasks are so much harder to manage during these events. Well done!

If you are bored and your GPU is idle...You could always help rescue TAAT from the clutches of the 'evil' TBST/XS conglomerate during the current FB Sprint, project Amicable Numbers. :D

It seems only stoneageman of XS has NOT switched to TBST (a lot of back and forth with others, such as SystemViper) https://stats.free-dc.org/team/ami/270
Stoneageman switched to TSBT today as well :ROFLMAO:

tsbt.PNG
 
Congratulations on taking 8th place! Long tasks are so much harder to manage during these events. Well done!

If you are bored and your GPU is idle...You could always help rescue TAAT from the clutches of the 'evil' TBST/XS conglomerate during the current FB Sprint, project Amicable Numbers. :D

It seems only stoneageman of XS has NOT switched to TBST (a lot of back and forth with others, such as SystemViper) https://stats.free-dc.org/team/ami/270
Congratulations! I see you guys won and didn't need my help anyway, but I wanted to explain why I didn't join in the sprint.

First, I don't switch teams at all anymore. I did it one time and still regret it. No offense to TAAT whatsoever, as your team is a great bunch of guys. I am just loyal to Team [H]. Additionally, I, like the rest of [H], am not participating in FB this year. Finally, I already have 2 billion+ points at AN, so am not really interested in crunching it any longer, unless there is a really, really good reason. A FB sprint doesn't qualify when my team isn't participating. I have goals in other GPU projects I need to hit and would rather use my electricity for those.

Also, congrats on TAAT's 3rd place finish overall for FB 2020! Very nice showing from your team! Great work!
 
I just jumped into this last comp and maybe someone can answer a question. I'm running GFN-18 (at 50% cores as completion times went down with that change) on my 3700X/1080TI and my 3950X. I'm running GFN-20 on my 3090. Considering the bonus on GFN-20 how should I be aiming my rig? Does the current config make sense or should I just run 20 the entire time until close to the end or does it all even out and nothing really changes? Thanks in advance for the help; I'd like to better understand for future participation :)
 
I just jumped into this last comp and maybe someone can answer a question. I'm running GFN-18 (at 50% cores as completion times went down with that change) on my 3700X/1080TI and my 3950X. I'm running GFN-20 on my 3090. Considering the bonus on GFN-20 how should I be aiming my rig? Does the current config make sense or should I just run 20 the entire time until close to the end or does it all even out and nothing really changes? Thanks in advance for the help; I'd like to better understand for future participation :)

I am running GFN 18's on CPU for all my rigs. It turns out that these are quite heavy on the cache so if you run too many they will start running very poorly. for example here is a screenshot of GFN 18's running on my 3950x and 3900x's both at 50% boinc usage (12 and 16 cpu tasks at a time) these chips are very similar so you would expect them to get similar scores / times per task but the 3950x was taking nearly twice as long (19000 seconds on average for 3950x VS 10000 seconds for 3900x)
image (8).png


To fix this I changed the Boinc CPU usage on my 3950x to 37.5 which is 12 tasks and the times then became very similar to my 3900x. Additionally you can see above that even with 4 more tasks running the 3950x had only managed to complete 16 tasks in the time it took the 3900x to complete 16. So while running 12 tasks leaves 4 cores unused it ended up being much faster overall. For GPU's i am running GFN 20's on all of them from my 1070ti to my 3080
 
Oh but i have to add watch out that you don't run dry on GFN 20's because i started not getting any new tasks this afternoon so i switched to 19's till that gets fixed (whatever the issue is)
 
For your 3700x I would expect you will also see similar gains dropping it down to 6 tasks at a time since that chip has 32MB l3 but you can certainly test and find out if whatever speed gains you make warrants the loss of 2 tasks running.
 
Thanks for the quick responses :D I'll keep an eye on the 20s, I've been here all day and didn't notice anything so so far so good. I'm glad I wasn't going crazy with the reduced core count running faster. skylaar24 had the same on his rig.
 
Yeah they seem to have come back and it was only an hour or two that it was problematic for me
 
This was the breakdown of the difference on my 3950x
running 16 tasks of GFN 18 at a time i was averaging around 333 minutes per task, 12 tasks had each task averaging 210 minutes.
So 1725 Points per task / 333 minutes = 5.17 Points per minute per task * 16 tasks = 82.78 total points per minute
OR
1725 points / 210 minutes = 8.2 PPM / task * 12 tasks = 98.45 PPM total
98.45 - 82.78 = 15.67 difference or almost 19% more points despite the 25% reduction in tasks running
over the course of the day this works out to a difference of 1440 * 15.67 = 22,564 more point per day dropping the CPU usage down to 37.5%
over the ten days this is almost a quarter million points on 1 rig!
 
do keep in mind this will vary from model to model. I tried running 12 tasks VS 16 on my 1950x and i ended up losing points overall. It all depends on how well these either fit within the cache or perhaps the overall memory bandwidth so i like to do points exercises like the above to sanity check things and make sure i am making the right decision.
 
I am running GFN 18's on CPU for all my rigs. It turns out that these are quite heavy on the cache so if you run too many they will start running very poorly. for example here is a screenshot of GFN 18's running on my 3950x and 3900x's both at 50% boinc usage (12 and 16 cpu tasks at a time) these chips are very similar so you would expect them to get similar scores / times per task but the 3950x was taking nearly twice as long (19000 seconds on average for 3950x VS 10000 seconds for 3900x)
View attachment 311380

To fix this I changed the Boinc CPU usage on my 3950x to 37.5 which is 12 tasks and the times then became very similar to my 3900x. Additionally you can see above that even with 4 more tasks running the 3950x had only managed to complete 16 tasks in the time it took the 3900x to complete 16. So while running 12 tasks leaves 4 cores unused it ended up being much faster overall. For GPU's i am running GFN 20's on all of them from my 1070ti to my 3080
My 3950x has settled in it looks like. Running 25%/100% GFN 18s
1608692941981.png
 
We are doing pretty good so far on the last PG challenge of the year.
Halfway through day 3 and the team is sitting in 5th place overall.

Current individual member contributions:

Capture.PNG



Top ten teams and scoring:


Capture.PNG



7 Days and 14 hours left as of this post
 
Part way into Day 6. 4 days 15 hours left in the challenge.


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We lost some of our lead to the team in 6th but some users have joined in the last few days and are doing a much better job maintaining our lead so thanks to wareyore and Priller for jumping in


Capture.PNG
 
Yeah your new GPU appears to be doing very well! I checked out your task times and you are only about 10 minutes slower than my 3080 @ 75% power target. This means you are close to twice as fast for GFN 20's as the previous AMD leader which was Radeon VII.
 
I'm currently at -6% power limit and down to 264-268 watts. Fans are 1400 rpm and hardly noticeable.
 
3 days and 9 hours remaining.
We continue to maintain our 5th place position going into the last few days here but with this competition anything can happen so everyone keep up the good work!
I noticed a certain Canadian team members score has not gone up any for some reason 🤨


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1609126540416.png
 
Coming down to the wire here. 12 hours and 30 minutes to go. This will all be over before i wake up tomorrow.

1609375469323.png



And Current Team Position:

1609375521218.png



I will update in the morning but doesn't look like too much will change *fingers crossed
 
Sorry I couldn't help more; had to get the card back to evga for RMA :/

Hey we wouldn't have kept 5th place without you so thanks for the help.


Final standings didn't really change here. We took 5th (barely) in the last challenge here.
This also means we managed a 5th place overall for the whole challenge series this year so congrats!

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1609445583619.png



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While these are not the "final" stats I don't think we will see anything change


Also for the yearly standing I want to congratulate EXT64 and RFGuy_KCCO for their finishes in in 6th and 7th overall in individual for the year. Great work!


1609445706804.png
 
Great work team! It was certainly a fun run last year and hitting all of the stages made us quite competitive. I'm not sure I'll be a completionist this year, but well see.
 
Great work team! It was certainly a fun run last year and hitting all of the stages made us quite competitive. I'm not sure I'll be a completionist this year, but well see.

Yeah i have not decided either, but If i do it again this year I will not miss the first event like i did last year (would have finished 2-3 spots higher overall rank) The first challenge kicks off Jan 14 with the Good Riddance 2020! Challenge.
 
I haven't decided, either. Did it full bore the last two years and am kind of burned out on it. Might just focus on other project goals this year. More MegaMilestones!
 
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My issue is fastgeek keeps 'slow burning' (for him) on WCG. So between that and other project goals, I'll be pretty swamped on CPU projects.
 
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