SETI.Germany's 11 Annual BOINC Pentathlon (2020)

Gilthanis

[H]ard|DCer of the Year - 2014
Joined
Jan 29, 2006
Messages
8,718
from 05 May 2020 00:00 UTC
to 19 May 2020 00:00 UTC - https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/
5 disciplines
1 winner

I want to encourage all DC'ers to participate and hopefully contribute under the [H] banner.

First event is announced April 30th. We will post more details and update this thread as time goes by. Make sure to check the 1st post for updated information daily.

2019's thread - https://hardforum.com/threads/10th-annual-boinc-pentathlon-hosted-by-seti-germany.1980020/
2018's thread - https://hardforum.com/threads/9th-annual-boinc-pentathlon-hosted-by-seti-germany.1957969/

The BOINC Pentathlon consists of 5 disciplines:
  1. Marathon (14 days) - Rosetta@home (CPU) - https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/team_display.php?teamid=5560
  2. Sprint (3 days) 5/16 - 5/19 - Ibercivis (CPU) - https://boinc.ibercivis.es/ibercivis/team_display.php?teamid=51
  3. City Run (5 days) 5/7 - 5/12 - Universe@home (CPU) - https://universeathome.pl/universe/team_display.php?teamid=1931
  4. Cross Country (5 days) 5/12 - 5/17 - Amicable Numbers (CPU and GPU) - https://sech.me/boinc/Amicable/team_display.php?teamid=1999
  5. Javelin Throw (5 x 1 day, only each team's third best daily score counts) - NumberFields (CPU and GPU) - https://numberfields.asu.edu/NumberFields/team_display.php?teamid=19
    1. 5/5-5/6 - first day
    2. - 5/10-5/11 - second day
    3. - 5/14-5/15 - third day
    4. - 5/15-5/16 - fourth day
    5. - 5/18-5/19 - fifth day
To make the Pentathlon as exciting and trouble-free as possible while at the same time maintaining a maximum of flexibility, all five projects are chosen by a small group of the organizers this year.
Projects are not eligible if they
  • cannot provide a sufficient number of workunits
  • do not support at least Windows and Linux
  • provide non-CPU-intensive (NCI) applications
  • are test-only projects
  • do not allow the creation of new accounts
  • do not support WebRPC

[H] Slack channel - https://join.slack.com/t/hardforum/shared_invite/zt-e1amiide-VVB9IK76b6EFNeOuSAdBxA
Let us know if it stops working.


Last year we finished 4th place (Our best EVER!) and also took Silver in the Sprint competition.
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More to come.
 
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Reserved for additional info.

Since our guides section is busted and not accessible, here is some helpful videos for setting up BOINC. Please subscribe to the channel to get updates on new content.



 
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The possibility of needing to reuse one of last years projects is interesting. Those projects were:

WCG OpenZika
NFS
yoyo
Einstein
LHC

I doubt Einstein will need to be reused, as there are several other GPU options. What other GPU projects do we have, and what brand of card runs them best? Please feel free to correct me on any of these:

Milkyway - Definite advantage to older AMD with 1/4 Double Precision, or Radeon VII
GPU Grid - Advantage Nvidia...wait, only Nvidia
Collatz Conjecture - It is a wash on modern cards - *Skillz
Amicable numbers - Advantage Nvidia - *Skillz
PrimeGrid - Advantage to Nvidia
Asteroids - Nvidia only? Advantage goes to CPU -don't waste GPU cycles on this one
NumberFields - OpenCL app in beta, started out great, then the admin discovered how to make the CPU app just as fast IIRC. For Linux, only AMD. AMD and Nvidia for Windows.
Moo! Wrapper - I don't know
SRbase - will most likely go to nVidia just as PG. Single Precision *Gilthanis
 
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SRBase will most likely go to nVidia just as PG. Single Precision
Moo! I'm not up to date on. In the past AMD has done really well but nobody here really runs it heavy.
NuberFields the last I heard grumblings was that it wasn't worth running the GPU's on unless that was your focus.

The rest sounds about right.
 
We are a week away. Shouldn't be too long before they start making announcements. Start removing those dust bunnies and get your rigs lined out.
 
pututu directed me over here to put some work in at BOINC. Just waiting for the work to assign at this point, correct? Sorry, I'm more of a set it and forget it... more emphasis on the forget it it :)
 
pututu directed me over here to put some work in at BOINC. Just waiting for the work to assign at this point, correct? Sorry, I'm more of a set it and forget it... more emphasis on the forget it it :)
The marathon run will likely be CPU project though the organizer did not explicitly say so this time around. It runs throughout the 14+5=19 days of the event. And yes, you can set it and forget it, other than occasionally checking that the rig is running correctly and the internet cable is plug in ;) . Glad to have you crunching for the team.
 
The marathon run will likely be CPU project though the organizer did not explicitly say so this time around. It runs throughout the 14+5=19 days of the event. And yes, you can set it and forget it, other than occasionally checking that the rig is running correctly and the internet cable is plug in ;) . Glad to have you crunching for the team.

Thanks!. I'm not going to keep double posting but it looks like I'm currently down and out. PSU went crapped itself when I loaded all 4 CPUs. :(
 
Yeah..definitely get it stable because it sucks to roll with the punches in the middle of the challenge. Especially if you had a lot of work units ready to report. This challenge relies heavily on a "bunkering" tactic.
 
So pardon the ignorance I'm old now, do we simply contribute to any BOINC project or will it be 5 specific projects we have to run during the competition ?
 
So pardon the ignorance I'm old now, do we simply contribute to any BOINC project or will it be 5 specific projects we have to run during the competition ?

Throughout the year any project you partake in with award boinc points to you and the team. During this challenge, only the 5 chosen projects will count towards the challenge, but any project will still count towards your BOINC overall.

This challenge just happens to be a few weeks long and 5 set projects.
 
The first event (Marathon) has been declared. Rosetta@home (surprise surprise) will be the Marathon event this year. It will go the whole duration of the event. Deadlines are typically 3 days, so don't worry about a bunker until May 2nd. However, until then you will want to make sure your rigs are set right for this project.

1. You can change the Target CPU run time in the project preferences. https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/...8206726&ttok=35eedeebba85d1894240a8eb8ac6aac3
1a) Why do this? I set mine to 1 day 12 hours (they recently increased it). This means my work units will try to run 24 hours before completing and reporting in. All it is doing is packing more science into each work unit. The advantages to this is using less data on an internet connection. It will also help reduce strain on their servers. The Downside to this is if it errors out, you risk losing more work completed. When you get to the last 2 days of the challenge, you will want to switch that to 1 hour so that you are reporting work as you go. You don't want their servers going down last minute and not getting the majority of your points credited in time.

2. Rosetta is RAM heavy. Make sure you have plenty of RAM to support all the work.

3. Rosetta is heavy on HDD IO's when it is starting up. When you have a lot of work units starting up at once, it can bring your system to its knees. SSD's don't have much issue with this. Keep an eye on it.

4. Rosetta is heavy on the L3 cache. Each work unit typically wants ~5MB. If you CPU is light on L3 cache, you will see your system be less efficient. Many people will run a mixture of work and limit the number of Rosetta work is running to maximize their CPU. Plan accordingly.
 
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Does Rosetta run on GPU and CPU, or CPU only? I'm installing BOINC right now.
 
If I can get my internet speed sorted out I'll be ready go with my 3950x in that case. :)
 
Trying to get a psu asap
Even Amazon is looking like May 6 or later.

I set the VM back down to 24cpu in hopes that I don't kill the 400W crutch thats currently holding it up.

1588307342422.png


And... ran out of memory lol. Weird, it said "waiting on memory" in the tasks view but said needed more disk in the Notices tab.. VM is 100GB with nothing installed.




For the [H]orde! After pillaging 3 servers, it now has 112GB. VM is still only running 24cpu but now has 80GB ram.
20200501_010203.jpg

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NumberFields have been chosen for the Javelin event. The first day will be 5/5-5/6. Four other days will be given throughout the 14 day event. This project can use GPU or CPU. CPU is pretty optimized.
 
How do I make sure my points are counting? And whoops, I didn't have a team deleted.. good news I think I only had 2000points on this machine..

When I go on the BOINCstats site I see 0 points. It'll probably be a little bit before it shows me on the [H] team for Rosetta.
1588385002335.png



Edit. looks like it is counting points going through the https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/team_members.php?teamid=5560&sort_by=expavg_credit&offset=20 site. I'm just not making much and not getting any new Rosetta jobs.
Good news- paper clips and low end PSUs are still holding it up. I'm just not getting any new work.

Gilthanis - FYI, Slack link isn't working
 
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How do I make sure my points are counting? And whoops, I didn't have a team deleted.. good news I think I only had 2000points on this machine..

When I go on the BOINCstats site I see 0 points. It'll probably be a little bit before it shows me on the [H] team for Rosetta.
View attachment 242246


Edit. looks like it is counting points going through the https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/team_members.php?teamid=5560&sort_by=expavg_credit&offset=20 site. I'm just not making much and not getting any new Rosetta jobs.
Good news- paper clips and low end PSUs are still holding it up. I'm just not getting any new work.

Gilthanis - FYI, Slack link isn't working
Try this one - https://join.slack.com/t/hardforum/shared_invite/zt-e1amiide-VVB9IK76b6EFNeOuSAdBxA Let me know if it doesn't work.
 
What are your disk usage settings in BOINC?
disk usage settings.PNG


Rosetta will eat a lot of disk space. Compound that with a lot of cores and you could be surprised how bloated it can get.
 
What are your disk usage settings in BOINC?
View attachment 242270

Rosetta will eat a lot of disk space. Compound that with a lot of cores and you could be surprised how bloated it can get.

Good call. It defaulted to 10GB. I set it to 20GB now just to make sure it does more.. then I can give the VM more disk. Looking at yours, I should do this regardless.
I know have 24 active WUs and 1 in the chamber. Thanks!
 
Good call. It defaulted to 10GB. I set it to 20GB now just to make sure it does more.. then I can give the VM more disk. Looking at yours, I should do this regardless.
I know have 24 active WUs and 1 in the chamber. Thanks!
Yeah...Rosetta is a rough project to support. Heavy startup IO's, can be heavy on RAM, loves L3 cache, and takes up a lot of disk space all while chewing through internet data limits...
 
The "old URL" alert is BS. When I copy/pasted the one they wanted me to use, it said it was already in use.. And there is plenty of disk.

Well I was going to ask about this as I'm seeing it in notifications all the time now.

Rosetta@home: Notice from BOINC
This project is using an old URL. When convenient, remove the project, then add https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

I'm guessing just ignore it ?
 
Yeah, just ignore them. They pop up on most projects for me even though it's the same address they suggest.
 
Just ignore it. Basically, the client is seeing two URL's. One is the secure and one not. Some projects keep the non-secure URL for backwards compatibility with older clients. It won't make any difference which one you use...
 
Universe@home was chosen for the City Run 5/7 - 5/12.
The work units appear to have 14 day deadlines.
 
Yeah...people talk down about ARM devices because they don't see thousands of points per day. However, for those looking for efficiency, they are hard to beat.
 
I'd never under estimated the ARM's army. May build one myself one of these days.
 
I'd never under estimated the ARM's army. May build one myself one of these days.
I only have about 30 phones/tablets in my house. They are cheaper than the Pi's but aren't as resilient. I've had a phARM for years...lol.
 
If they'd support linux on ARM better I'd invest more in it. I wish the android client supported remote control.
 
You can use Team Viewer to remote control them. However, if you mean Boinctasks, then yeah... Nativeboinc was the way to go but it is no longer supported. They have an alpha version of a new client that lets you finally rename your Android devices, but I hear it is real buggy. I do not know if it supports BOINCtasks or not.
 
If they'd support linux on ARM better I'd invest more in it. I wish the android client supported remote control.
Raspbian is quite nice for everything I’ve needed it for - pihole, kodi, and now 3x Boinc boxes.

As I let my 4GB pi 4s run Rosetta, it’s looking more and more like one at stock speed will generate about half the points of my core 2quad 9650. I’m also testing with a 35% over clock and you actually get quite a bit of performance for 4 or 5 watts each.
 
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