What the heck; I'm never getting around to making an AP27 thread anyway.
Current race: PPS-Sieve, December 18-21 (10:44 UTC)
Welcome to another year of PrimeGrid races! Here's the (tentative) list of all races for this year:
2. 14-17 March 03:14:15 SR5-LLR From Pi to Paddy Challenge 3 days
3. 19-28 April 18:00:00 WOO-LLR, CUL-LLR Cullen Birthday Challenge 9 days
4. 20-25 June 22:34:00 PPS-Mega Summer Solstice Challenge 5 days
5. 2-5 August 21:00:00 TRP-Sieve Summer Olympics Challenge 3 days
6. 2-7 September 18:00:00 ESP-Sieve LLR Summer Paralympics Challenge 5 days
7. 3-4 October 18:00:00 SGS-LLR World Space Week Kickoff Challenge 1 day
8. 18-23 November 18:00:00 AP27 Wallis is Born Challenge 5 days
9. 18-21 December 10:44:00 PPS-Sieve Winter Solstice Challenge 3 days
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.
Current race: PPS-Sieve, December 18-21 (10:44 UTC)
Welcome to another year of PrimeGrid races! Here's the (tentative) list of all races for this year:
2. 14-17 March 03:14:15 SR5-LLR From Pi to Paddy Challenge 3 days
3. 19-28 April 18:00:00 WOO-LLR, CUL-LLR Cullen Birthday Challenge 9 days
4. 20-25 June 22:34:00 PPS-Mega Summer Solstice Challenge 5 days
5. 2-5 August 21:00:00 TRP-Sieve Summer Olympics Challenge 3 days
6. 2-7 September 18:00:00 ESP-
7. 3-4 October 18:00:00 SGS-LLR World Space Week Kickoff Challenge 1 day
8. 18-23 November 18:00:00 AP27 Wallis is Born Challenge 5 days
9. 18-21 December 10:44:00 PPS-Sieve Winter Solstice Challenge 3 days
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 or later ("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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