4. Boinc pentathlon 2013

[[2W]SEARCHER]

:biggrin: Hello TeAm AnandTech,

:biggrin: Hello Friends from TeAm AnandTech.

Team SETI.Germany continues it's new invented challenge and invites all BOINC-Teams to participate in the 4.rd BOINC PENTATHLON, following the ideals of the ancient Pentathlon.

It will start May the 5th 2013 (00:00 UTC) and will end May the 18th 2013 (23:59 UTC).

Like in the ancient Greece, the Pentathlon will be held in 5 disciplines. That means within 14 days the participants will have to crunch 5 different projects, all of them for a period of 5 days. That said, you can easily see that some projects will have to be crunched at the same time.

Each team that would like to participate has to sigh up : http://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/anmeldung.php?&lang=en until April the 27. th 2013. Like in the last year the favourites in the different disciplines can be chosen by every team on their own. The project that gaines the most voices will be crunched.

A list of the projects that can be chosen from can be found here : http://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/25_en_Disciplines.html , but you can also suggest other projects. (But before suggesting other projects, please check if the project and/or their servers would be able to withstand the combined BOINC forces. We do not want to bring any project server down.)

More information can be found here : http://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/22_en_Welcome.html

NEW RULES 2013 :

1. All disciplines are now 5 days announced before the start (no more than 1 week)
2. A of the five disciplines is a marathon discipline. It is calculated over the entire pentathlon (or until no longer work units available). The scoring is the same with the other disciplines.

In the last year it was very exciting until the end.


Many Greatings SEARCHER

 

[Ken g6]

Woo, fun, the start of the pentathlon is two(.75) days before the end of the PrimeGrid Woodall race.

I guess we need to pick our four applications. (I wonder what Marathon is.)

2. You can guess what GPU application I'd like. Most of the others are OK too, although Collatz doesn't seem to have the latest versions ported to Linux, and the Linux apps are hard to install. :| So I don't want Collatz.

3. For physics and chemistry, I don't want Leiden Classical. I have a hard time getting it to consistently give me work for some reason. I'd also have concerns about theSkyNet POGS having enough work. I don't know much about most of the others, although Asteroids@Home has gone well for me. Oh, and SIMAP has work for two months if that's enough.

4. For WCG, I'm easy. Although I'm not sure all projects always have work.

5. For math, I don't want NFS@home. I know many of you like it, but the RAM requirements are too much for me. I don't know about a lot of the others, but Yoyo is going well for me at the moment.

 

[Rattledagger]

For WCG, hopefully none chooses Clean Energy, since it's got very long time between checkpoint, and a high chance of getting a "no heartbeat" the more CEP2-tasks runs at once. Also, CEP2 has fairly large uploads. The other WCG-projects should all have work, and should work fairly good on all computers. Some has 64-bit applications possibly giving a small boost.

For GPU, while Milkyway is a nice choise, it requires double-precision and many is stuck with their low-end Nvidia-cards (like GTX-690, GTX-680 and so on). My personal choise would be Einstein@home, but since cpu-usage is minimal can also do a little Collatz.

For the "Physics & Chemistry"-part, I've no knowledge about any of the listed projects this year.

But, the big question is, is there any interest in the TeAm to take part in this years Pentathlon, or is it like the two previous years something like "it crashes with Primegrid, wherefore won't take part in the Pentathlon".

 

[[2W]SEARCHER]

@ Ken g6, sorry my Friend but the BOINC PENTATHLON start every Year at same Time. And it`s up your Team, start here a Thread for a Teamvoting what Project your Team like to crunch.

@ Rattledagger, nice to see you in this Forum here too.


Many Greatings SEARCHER

 

[StitchExperimen]

I'm willing to get involved if you want to do it.

I would like WCG and I have 12 threads @ 3.1GHz to put into it. I'm already set up for Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 but I can change to a different catagory

I do have a problem in the GPU area I have a split. I need a project that takes both AMD and Nvidia and I don't know those projects listed. I have 2 HD 7950s and I am going to buy a second 660 Ti in a week and a half I'm pretty sure.
What projects take both???

Stitch

 

[Rattledagger]

I do have a problem in the GPU area I have a split. I need a project that takes both AMD and Nvidia and I don't know those projects listed. I have 2 HD 7950s and I am going to buy a second 660 Ti in a week and a half I'm pretty sure.
What projects take both???

Taking a quick look on the projects, apparently Moo doesn't have any usable application for Amd-7xxx-cards, only for older cards, so it's strange Moo is a possible project-choise...


In Milkyway Amd-cards has a big advantage, except for anyone with a low-end Amd-card not having double-precision. In Primegrid Nvidia seems to have an advantage, where's atleast fewer of Primegrid's sub-projects having both Amd & Nvidia-support.

For the other projects, I'm not aware of any big advantage to either type of card, and atleast all cards will work for these projects, as long as it's not too old.

 

[StitchExperimen]

Moo! Wrapper and Einstein@home are not good for Nvidia.
But possibly PrimeGrid is a possibility I'll have to ask some questions over there unless since some of you have raced over there in the past what can we expect in the way of GPU stuff for constant quick points cause those world record prime searches take <8 days on a 660Ti.

 

[Ken g6]

I can personally recommend the PrimeGrid PPS Sieve application. Because I wrote it.

Yes, the nVidia app is much better than the AMD app. I was planning to try redoing the AMD app this summer if I actually got an AMD card. The GCN architecture may have more potential if I rewrite the app for it.

 

[Rattledagger]

Moo! Wrapper and Einstein@home are not good for Nvidia.

Since Moo doesn't even have an application for Amd-7xxx-cards, this project isn't interesting.

As for Einstein@home, they had CUDA for much longer than Ati/Amd, and atleast at the start CUDA had an advantage. Going by the benchmark-thread over at the Einstein@home-forums it looks like Nvidia is keeping-up if runs 1 wu/GPU but is losing if runs multiple wu/GPU, see the results http://www.dskag.at/images/Research/EinsteinGPUperformancelist.pdf. This is atleast the case if compares HD-7870 against GTX-660 Tl, where roughly the same at 1 wu/GPU, a little gap if runs 2 wu/GPU, and Nvidia much worse if runs 3 wu/GPU.

Unfortunately the benchmark-results is lacking numbers for many cards and # wu/GPU, making it hard to compare. Still, atleast to me the Amd-advantage seems to be less than 2x faster than Nvidia, so atleast for the Pentathlon Nvidia-cards can be a large part of a teams total credit.

In a decision to buy either Amd or Nvidia on the other hand, Einstein@home's benchmark-numbers shows Amd is a better buy.

I can personally recommend the PrimeGrid PPS Sieve application. Because I wrote it.

Yes, the nVidia app is much better than the AMD app

Ok, meaning Primegrid would be a bad choise for the Pentathlon, since by "much better" would guess on Nvidia being maybe 3x faster than Amd, making using Amd-cards for the Primegrid-part largely useless.


So, with Moo out of the running due to lack of application, Primegrid out due to large disadvantage to Amd while Milkyway and Einstein is out due to large disadvantages to Nvidia, where's only two GPU-projects left to choose, Collatz or DiRT. Personally the only DiRT I'll run is the PC-games DIRT 2 and DIRT 3, so if Einstein@home is out of the running my choise would be Collatz.

 

[Ken g6]

But Collatz has a huge disadvantage on Linux. What's wrong with DistrRTGen? I've tried it, and I'd rather go with DistrRTGen than Collatz, unless Collatz substantially improves their platform support.

 

[Rattledagger]

But Collatz has a huge disadvantage on Linux. What's wrong with DistrRTGen? I've tried it, and I'd rather go with DistrRTGen than Collatz, unless Collatz substantially improves their platform support.

Uhm, if you're concerned about OS-support, why do you recommend DiRT.

When it comes to GPU's, where's 6 combinations, Nvidia/windows, Amd/windows, Nvidia/Linux, Amd/Linux, Nvidia/Mac and Amd/Mac. DiRT has only applications for 3 of these 6 while Collatz has applications for all 6. Einstein and Primegrid also has applications for all 6, while Milkyway is missing the Mac-applications.


As for DiRT, I don't like the goals of this project.

 

[Ken g6]

Huh, I hadn't noticed DiRT's lack of support for other platforms. I guess I was just happy it supported Linux at all.

I did manage to get Collatz running here on Linux, though it takes using an app_info.xml. I'm not even sure app_info.xml is supported on the latest BOINC versions. And I still don't like the lack of a new version of the app.

I'd still go with PrimeGrid. The ATI apps are slower - it's hard to compare how much slower - but still much faster than the CPU. And all the apps "just work" - you don't need app_info.xml.

 

[Rattledagger]

I did manage to get Collatz running here on Linux, though it takes using an app_info.xml. I'm not even sure app_info.xml is supported on the latest BOINC versions. And I still don't like the lack of a new version of the app.

Both app_config.xml and app_info.xml is supported by the latest BOINC-clients, but some projects isn't supporting app_info.xml and atleast WCG will block people from using this when an updated WCG-client is released.

Appart for SETI@home where users needs app_info.xml to run optimized applications, for most projects the new app_config.xml is the way to go to enable running multiple wu/GPU in case it's an advantage.

 

[StitchExperimen]

(didn't come out with quote.)
See next post.

 

[StitchExperimen]

I can personally recommend the PrimeGrid PPS Sieve application. Because I wrote it.

Yes, the nVidia app is much better than the AMD app. I was planning to try redoing the AMD app this summer if I actually got an AMD card. The GCN architecture may have more potential if I rewrite the app for it.

I'll tell you what. Let me get in this 2nd Nvidia card 660 Ti in about 3 1/2 weeks and make sure I can get it running with this Xeon 8/16 core processor.
Then if you'll in your farm put a equivalent Nvidia on GPUGRID under my name I'll let you borrow a very good Gigabyte HD 7950 to work with, (in OpenCL it will run at 1200 at stock voltage) and if you need two HD 7950s same deal. Or there is the option of sending me Nvidia cards as a temporary swap and I can run them in my machines.
What do you think?
__________________

 

[Ken g6]

I appreciate the offer, but this GTX 460 barely fits in my current machine, and my only other discrete card is a GT430. I need a new case to support an AMD card. I'd like to wait and install Windows 8 on a new machine too. The current plan is to wait until Haswell is out (which I can optimize the app for too), and Colorado's fire season is over, and then build a completely new desktop.

Now, if you could benchmark Linux binaries I would send you on an AMD card, that might accelerate things. But I'd still have to get a build environment set up - the one I had went away when my Ubuntu 9.04 install broke.

 

[StitchExperimen]

I appreciate the offer, but this GTX 460 barely fits in my current machine, and my only other discrete card is a GT430. I need a new case to support an AMD card. I'd like to wait and install Windows 8 on a new machine too. The current plan is to wait until Haswell is out (which I can optimize the app for too), and Colorado's fire season is over, and then build a completely new desktop.

Now, if you could benchmark Linux binaries I would send you on an AMD card, that might accelerate things. But I'd still have to get a build environment set up - the one I had went away when my Ubuntu 9.04 install broke.

I'm reading the other web pages http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=2683#25968

I can boot from a thumb drive. The motherboard is a ASRock Z77 OC formula LGA1155. First concern is drivers for the motherboard in Linux.