NFS@home challenge

hanluc · 10 Dec 2012 at 13:38

NFS@Home December to Remember!

There's a boinc stats challenge for NFS@home starting at midnight tonight for a week, then there's a part II immediately after for another week

I'm sure many of you have never even heard of this project, only myself and Phil have only ever crunched it, it's a maths project, and a part of the DC Vault. Website is here, and here's our stats page, we're currently in 64th.

It's a CPU only, and a RAM intensive project, up to 1 GB per thread on certain WUs, it does tend to run a bit quicker in Linux I've found, though this is not a necessity.

I don't expect there to be great interest in this, however anyone wishing to participate please feel free, even if it's just to test your RAM

hanluc · 10 Dec 2012 at 18:16

Biffa said:
ugh.. sounds like my worst nightmare. 1GB per thread of CPU only mathsgeekstuffness

.... well you can select in the NFS site preferences work units that are *only* 0.5 gigs per thread, but the 1 gig ones are more productive, I have 2 gigs available per thread on my machines :cool:

, but I know what you mean, I was planning on tackling this project anyway, then I saw the challenge and thought I'd ask, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

hanluc · 10 Dec 2012 at 23:00

TheTross said:
Go on then, I'm in . Only four threads though I'm afraid, and I'll have to break off at some point as I have a load of correlizer work to finish before the 19th.

Great

whatever you can manage and for however long is appreciated cheers.

PhilthyPhil said:
Giving this a go on my 3770k under vmware. I only have 8gb memory in tho (stupid mini-itx mobo ) so can't run all 8 threads. I should really get round to putting in the 2x8gb that I got to replace my 4x4gb and has been sat on my desk for 3 months coz I'm lazy

Thanks Phil, you might be OK with all 8 if you run a mixed bag of work units, by default I think they're all selected, both the 0.5 and the 1 gig ones, but I'm sure you know what you're doing.

hanluc · 12 Dec 2012 at 00:06

24 hrs in and we're 3rd

Thank you ReaVerUK & GrandmasterD for joining in.

We're hot on the heels of 2nd place but 4th is not too far behind us.

Worth stating, the most productive work units (points wise) are the lasievef & lasieve5f work units, but they use 1 Gig of memory per thread, if your machine can meet these RAM requirements, check only these in your NFS preferences (click edit) Not enough RAM will bring your machine to its knees, when I ran it with a 2700K and 8 Gigs of RAM, my mouse cursor could hardly move with all 8 threads going, this was in windows.

Also worth stating again that Linux is quicker than windows with this project, around 30%, but I wouldn't bother if you haven't got Linux set up already.

hanluc · 12 Dec 2012 at 20:48

Hello Carlos, is there any particular reason why Linux users should avoid lasievef and just do lasieve5f? I've been doing both on my Linux machines and can't see any difference in run times between the two.

hanluc · 4 Apr 2013 at 10:46

I issued an asteroids challenge over a month ago which starts this Fri, I was careful to time it so it didn't overlap any other challenges going on, unfortunately that's exactly what your NFS challenge is now doing. Both your challenges clash with the one we will have going on.

hanluc · 20 Jul 2015 at 15:32

Andy have you changed the default boinc client memory usage? I think the default is set at only 50% when in use. It's under tools/computer preferences/disk and memory usage.

hanluc · 3 Aug 2015 at 09:03

Carlos Pinho said:
Are you guys permitted to set a challenge at BOINCstats.com? I can't....

We can do this, however I see you are with SETI.USA, the team founder at BOINCstats is "Team SETI.USA" so the person in charge of that account could do it for you, but I don't mind setting it up, do you have a particular date in mind?

hanluc · 3 Aug 2015 at 23:00

We're in.

On a side note I'll be downing tools this weekend as I'll be going away.

hanluc · 20 Aug 2015 at 19:50

This challenge starts in around a week, if we are going to load up and bunker, I'd say tomorrow or maybe the day after, deadline for the work units are 7 days.

Are not able to partake in this one Andy?

hanluc · 24 Aug 2015 at 20:46

PDW said:
Cache didn't hold enough ?

No it didn't, maximum my machines can get is 800 tasks each, worked out I'd have ran dry 1-2 days before the start so I decided to start again, should have enough for Fri morning now

hanluc · 28 Aug 2015 at 07:59

PDW said:
Nice dump

Thanks

Could have been better though, timing wasn't perfect, plus I only got enough work units for 4 days because of the 100 work units per core limitation, which I've since found out (by lurking in the TSBT forums

) I could have got round with an app_info & client state tricking the server into thinking I had more cores that I actually have.

hanluc · 28 Sep 2015 at 08:02

Recent works units seem to have half the runtime of past ones, but give out the the same points, hence why our production has increased

Nice little cluster of teams to stomp ahead

hanluc · 9 Oct 2015 at 08:53

Abandoning this for now, too many computation errors on the latest batch.

hanluc · 8 Jul 2016 at 10:26

We're in.

hanluc · 4 Oct 2016 at 12:29

Are we up for this? starts in a couple of days. The project has a lot of 16e work units that need clearing. We could always just help the project out later and not join the challenge if it's too short notice.