WCG Birthday Challenge - strategy

Once Windows 10 decides to finish up its updates (did a clean install), my 3930k should come back online with a couple GTX 970's. The 2P's will come later and I'm hoping to have one or both up by end of the weekend. My time is limited and I'm going to be very busy the next couple weekends. My son turns 1 on the 15th and I'm still not fully moved in to the new place yet. Close, but not complete.
 
We are going to need to bunker the hell out of those 10 day deadline sub-projects to get into the top 10 unless we can get some more D to join the team in the meantime.
 
On second thought. Maybe we might be in a good position for a top 10 finish. I just searched for the top 15 current teams to see if they have signed up for the Challenge and it seems only about 5 of them have signed up. Unless I am mistaken. A good bunker and follow through should net us a top 10 finish this year.
 
fastgeek How many WU's are your rigs pulling now? I know before you had issue with it just giving you enough for all your cores to crunch.

Are you getting enough WU's to bunker 5 - 6 days before you run out?
 
Yeah... IBM and Merrist College don't really participate and they tend to be 2 of the highest producers at WCG. So, we should hit top 10 ok. However, bunkering is still needed if you really want to bring a gun to the gun fight...
 
I have all my boxen set to .01 of work buffer. On the 9th I am going to select all projects to no new work except WCG. On the 10th I am going to change settings to 10 days of work buffer and 10 additional days of work. Once I get each unit filled up with as much work as they can hold I am shutting down networking for them all.

Does anyone know the IP to block for WCG to block sending and receiving work?

phoenicis I know you're having fun playing whack-a-mole on the projects, but can we count on you to bunker for this project?

pututu which project should we bunker for the best possible points? Open Zika? Has 10 day deadline and gives pretty good points, right? No? Maybe?

ChristianVirtual I know you're in for bunkering. Right?
 
Skillz said:
phoenicis I know you're having fun playing whack-a-mole on the projects, but can we count on you to bunker for this project?
Click to expand...

Absolutely you can. I'll aim to set things up at the weekend before I go away for the week.

I've been considering what to run though. I recall reading somewhere (maybe Gil?) that there was a task limit of 35 per thread. If this is correct then a possible plan may be:
  • Download max of MCM as although not the best points per hour, it's the best overall points per complete work unit out of the sub-projects with readily available work. The drawback to this is that MCM requires a quorum of 2 but this should be ok over a 7 day race.
  • Use the pututu boost method I.e. run boinc at 50% cpu cores for a short while before disabling the network.
  • Run either OET or SCC after unloading the bunker. OET has been my go to sub project for pph but I had a mixed experience recently with an intel chip.
Another approach may be to run multiple boinc instances but that will be too much messing around for me.
 
That might not be a bad idea. Running MCM for the bunker and switching to one of the faster sub projects after it starts.
 
I don't like posting stuff like this on the open forum; but figured I'd let you lot know I'm going to be on vacation for the second half of this month. Not sure if I'm going to leave things on at work or not, since if my proxy goes down I'd have to remote in to restart it... and I really don't like doing that. (Paranoid I suppose) There's also the fact that having lots of running computers in my lab whilst I'm gone might raise a question or two. :p

Strictly from a competitive point of view this sucks, since we've whittled down the lead team Christians have on us to ~1,016,000 points. That said, from the personal point of view, this is a long overdue vacation and visit to my family. ;)
 
Dang. I understand though.

Also this is the private, invite only forum.
 
I know; that's why I posted it in this subforum vs. the main one. :p
 
phoenicis said:
there was a task limit of 35 per thread
Click to expand...
You can trick the WCG with <ncpus> option in the cc_config.xml file but the total WUs per client is somewhere around 1000 WUs max from what I've seen so far.

Skillz said:
pututu which project should we bunker for the best possible points
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OET under linux was good among the other sub-projects the last time I ran this in Oct.

fastgeek said:
I'm going to be on vacation for the second half of this month
Click to expand...
Enjoy you vacation. I'm going on a long vacation too next month, so all rigs will be shut down, just for a peace of mind...
 
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Tell me more about this trick.

Whats the highest "N" value you can use?
 
Post#1

Second thing I would do is set each VM to use the cc_config file.
<cc_config>
<options>
<ncpus>48</ncpus>
</options>
</cc_config>

48 is just an example for a 48 core machine. Change this number to however many cores you want BOINC to think you have. This means that regardless of how many CPU cores you assign to the VM... BOINC will try and download work based on how many CPU's you make it think you have. You can always change this back to something to match the VM after you get work.
Click to expand...
 
BTW, you can do this on regular rig or even VM to get more tasks but I think the limit per rig is still around 1000 tasks.
 
My 48 core and 64 core rigs are both around 1050 tasks and I can't get anymore. That's with a 10 day work que and 10 day additional settings.

Also that IP does block it. I forgot to post that.
 
Gilthanis, see below on one of my rigs "ASROCK-Ubuntu". There are 70 pages of "In Progress" status.
Each page shows 15 tasks. 15 tasks per page x 70 pages = 1050 tasks.

Screenshot of the 1st page. Not sure if you can view this rig. This rig is setup as VM with 27 cores. I did not even play with the <ncpus> option within the cc_config.xml file. Let me know if you need more clarifications.

Do others experience the same thing?
upload_2017-11-7_19-58-4.png



Page #70 of the same rig.

upload_2017-11-7_20-0-49.png
 
Gilthanis, see post here for additional information. Mmonnin claims to get 1200 WU max but I've been getting somewhere close to 1000, maybe 1100 tasks at some point in time (by counting # pages with "in progress" status). New limit seems to be 70 threads per thread or a total max limit of somewhere 1000 tasks, whichever has the lowest constraint.
 
I have the following load with 3 ryzen (1700x, 8/16) exclusive assignments

17x1: 1003 WU (66 pages + 13 )
17x2: 1113 WU (74 pages + 3)
17x3: 1118 WU (75 pages + 8);

also nearly 70 WU/thread

Screen Shot 2017-11-08 at 23.53.17.png
 
Well my bunker has over 10k WU's.

10k.jpg


That's a few 4P boxes worth of WUs.

Plus I have a few quad core intel, 10c20t Intel, 6c12t intel and 2c4t intel CPU with 1000 tasks each rig as well.

The quads probably wont finish all the tasks before the deadline, but I imagine the all the 4P (4k+ WU's) will and possibly the 10c20t Intel might be able to crunch all it's WUs (1000) as well.

I also blocked the IP at my router so nothing from WCG can get in or out now. This allows my GPUs to still gather WUs since it's impossible to get enough tasks on them to last more than a day.
 
Does this go by WCG points of BOINC points? I'm looking at last years points and it seems 1st place won with 174 MILLION points in 7 days?!! That's gotta be WCG points, right? I mean no way are they doing 174 million BOINC points on this in a week.
 
fastgeek I've got a plan. Since you wont be able to run your boxen during the challenge I think we might be able to get something from your boxen if you run MCM and FAAH1 projects now. My thought is that nearly all the teams will be bunkering like crazy (example here) and thus their is a good chance that your quorum partner will not upload his until after the event starts and thus both of you will get points.

While I believe 90%+ of your complete tasks will probably validate before the event starts those 10% that get validated during the event are better than nothing.
 
Updated the client, switched over to just those for projects, and started bunkering the 10 day run. Happy to help out on this one. Usually I'm too busy to make any changes.
 
When I look at WCG points, maybe this is wrong but I get the best Points Per Hour in this order MCM, FAH2, MIP, ZIKA, SCC, OET.
MCM and FAH2 are 15-20% higher than what I get from OET and SCC is not far ahead of OET.
*** editing as I was able to get some work unites from my faster machine and the numbers are a little closer ***

My plan was to bunker MCM and MIP as they have 7 and 10 day turn ins. Then come 11/16, try to run MCM and FAH2 and if there was not enough work add in MIP and ZIKA if needed.

Please check SCC and OET as the work units seem to take longer after this weekend.
 
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Skillz said:
fastgeek I've got a plan. Since you wont be able to run your boxen during the challenge I think we might be able to get something from your boxen if you run MCM and FAAH1 projects now. My thought is that nearly all the teams will be bunkering like crazy (example here) and thus their is a good chance that your quorum partner will not upload his until after the event starts and thus both of you will get points.

While I believe 90%+ of your complete tasks will probably validate before the event starts those 10% that get validated during the event are better than nothing.
Click to expand...

You mean FAAH2, right? ;)

Tell you guys what, I'm going to leave the boxes running and we'll just have to hope that my proxy doesn't choke before I can get to it. Did bump up the "days of work" limit on most of the boxes, which should help in that event. Once the event is over, I'll likely throttle them or shut them off.

Also found that my 4P E7 was offline (although BOINC REFUSES to run at 100% load w/ HT turned on.. no idea why. Half tempted to move it to Ubuntu before I leave) Also found the 4P Broadwell was sitting at the Windows login screen. Was wondering why the output was a little lower than expected. :ROFLMAO: Do have several more 2P and a couple 4P systems laying around, but it gets to be a PITFA powering them, dealing with the noise, etc. :p

With all the WUs I'm churning out right now, the team should get something out of them one way or the other no matter what. In fact, just checked and have 132 pages worth of pending right now. Am currently #23 in the project based on yesterdays output... but man... there are some CRAZY numbers in the top 13.
 
Funny to go from seeing a good amount of points per day to now just 10 - 12 results from the Kindles.
 
My points are from my cell phone and tablet the past couple days. ;)

Cool thing is even though a bunch of us are bunkering it doesn't seem like our points have dropped off all that much.

My recruiting of old timers seems to be working. We might be a contender for a top 5 finish.
 
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