Current race: Sophie Germain Prime Search (LLR), November 14-17 (18:00 UTC)
Welcome to another year of PrimeGrid races! Here's the (tentative) list of all races for this year:
The first and third races allow working on any of the projects listed. In both cases projects on the left provide more credit but require more CPU (or GPU) time.
The rest of the advice in this post is specifically about LLR races, which are 5 out of the 9 races.
What you need:
What may help:
What won't help (but won't hurt either):
What won't help (and will hurt, sort of):
Welcome and good luck to all!
P.S. If no one has posted stats lately, try tracking your stats with my user script. With that installed, visit the current race's Team stats link for TeAm stats.
Welcome to another year of PrimeGrid races! Here's the (tentative) list of all races for this year:
Code:
1. 3-11 January 18:00 SOB-LLR, PSP-LLR, ESP-LLR Year of the Sheep Challenge 8 days
2. 15-20 March 07:41 SR5-LLR Solar Eclipse Challenge 5 days
3. 23 April - 1 May 18:00 GFN-WR, GFN-Short (GPUs!) World Expo Challenge 8 days
4. 12-15 June 18:00 SOB/PSP/ESP-Sieve PrimeGrid Birthday Challenge 3 days
5. 10-12 August 18:00 TRP-Sieve Perseid Shower Challenge 2 days
6. 10-15 September 18:00 CUL-LLR Reign Record Challenge 5 days
7. 4-9 [s]7[/s] October 18:00 TRP-LLR World Animal Day Challenge [s]3[/s] 5 days
[b]8. [s]12[/s] 14-17 Nov. 18:00 SGS-LLR Leonids Shower Challenge [s]5[/s] 3 days[/b]
9. 19-22 December 04:48 PPS-Sieve (GPUs!) Winter Solstice Challenge 3 daysThe first and third races allow working on any of the projects listed. In both cases projects on the left provide more credit but require more CPU (or GPU) time.
The rest of the advice in this post is specifically about LLR races, which are 5 out of the 9 races.
What you need:
- One or more fast x86 processors. (Even slow ones will do!)
- Windows (Vista or later 64-bit, or XP or later 32-bit), Linux, or MacOS 10.4+.
- BOINC, attached to PrimeGrid (http://www.primegrid.com/).
- Your PrimeGrid Preferences with only the above project(s) selected in the Projects section.
What may help:
- An Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, or Haswell-based ("Core series" other than first-generation) processor with AVX may be 20-70% faster than with the default application. Sadly, that does not include Pentium or Celeron processors, or AMD processors.
- Turning off hyper-threading. It really does help, even more than just doing half as much work as you have virtual cores.
- Faster RAM might help on many races, as long as it's stable.
- A 64-bit OS may help a little.
- [post=30943822]Juggling[/post] in some extra WUs.
What won't help (but won't hurt either):
- A large amount of RAM.
- Any GPUs.
- Any Android devices.
What won't help (and will hurt, sort of):
- Unstable processors. (Invalid work will be deducted! If Prime95 worked recently on your processor, it should be stable.)
- Work not downloaded and uploaded within the challenge. (It's not counted.) Should you not be able to be in front of one or more computers at that time, there are several options:
- You can often set BOINC's network connection preferences to wait until a minute or two after race time.
- On Linux [post=29529001]my race script[/post] might work.
- And for short work units, you can just set the queue level very low (0.01 days). This also makes it more likely that you will be a prime finder rather than a double-checker. But you might want to raise their queue size after the challenge is underway.
Welcome and good luck to all!
P.S. If no one has posted stats lately, try tracking your stats with my user script. With that installed, visit the current race's Team stats link for TeAm stats.
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