The Scottish Boinc Team

Megacruncher wrote: ↑Mon Sep 21, 2020 1:09 am

Miklos M wrote: ↑Sun Sep 20, 2020 8:20 pm Can we do a FB and qualify for the top 25? Any ideas, anyone?

If you are wondering whether we have the resources to fight a FB Sprint and simultaneously compete in this challenge then that's a fair question.
I think priority will be given to the sprint, whatever it is, but we will all spare a bit for WCG. Then of course we have our WCG stalwarts who always crunch it come what may.

FB is priority for me I'm afraid. I only have the dregs on WCG since it is run-time : my solitary Windows machine + low-performance Xeon cores + rasp pi and maybe an Android TV box if I could remember where I hid it

The good thing is that TaaT have taken defeat in the PG Sprint very badly (snigger) and are piling a lot of resources onto Thor to make sure they beat TSBT. You can see why they EXPECTED to win the FB Sprint by looking at the 2019 one. My heart bleeds for them

Looks like we have many more team mates doing wcg this leg, sounds great!

"The good thing is that TaaT have taken defeat in the PG Sprint very badly (snigger) and are piling a lot of resources onto Thor to make sure they beat TSBT. You can see why they EXPECTED to win the FB Sprint by looking at the 2019 one. My heart bleeds for them." Yes, I am also very sad for them, hah.
They all count david, drags also. I am in with all cpu's for the run time. Saving the gpu's for the Sprint.

I'm going to leave what I have running on WCG. Could have another 576 hrs per day if there was any droid work.

"FB is priority for me I'm afraid. I only have the dregs on WCG since it is run-time : my solitary Windows machine + low-performance Xeon cores + rasp pi and maybe an Android TV box if I could remember where I hid it." Nice dregs, lol.

First update and we are 17th. Just ahead of TaaT! Nice start.

Alez wrote: ↑Mon Sep 21, 2020 7:54 pm I'm going to leave what I have running on WCG. Could have another 576 hrs per day if there was any droid work.

Select Open Pandemics. Only needs Android 4.4+ I'm in the process of scrubbing my android systems and getting them on WCG. BTW, teamviewer now has an app "Teamviewer Host" available on Google Play. It will give true remote control on your Android, which is critical due to some of my androids not connecting to WCG under Native Boinc so I had to install the Berkeley version which doesn't allow remote GUI

Nice going Team! I was able to produce 57 days in the last 24 hours, almost all of them are Open Pandemics. Running 66 cores at a 100% of the time.

With 23 of us committed to crunching WCG we are looking powerful. Six days to go team!

I am finding it particularly difficult to get excited about a challenge where the stats only update once per day

They update 9am and 9pm on the wcg site for individuals and teams. The standings get posted on the evening after the last post.

Looks like we slipped a little, down to 20th place. We can do better tomorrow.

Miklos M wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 1:57 am Looks like we slipped a little, down to 20th place. We can do better tomorrow.

Maybe.
I suspect that a whole lot of cores are already being diverted onto pre-emptive bunkering for the FB sprint which starts tomorrow. The sprint project will be announced at 2100 UTC tonight. If it's a GPU sprint then I'll switch 90% of my cores back to WCG. If not then it'll be all the Pi cores plus a few others. It's a shame that this sprint overlaps 100% with this leg of the challenge.

Last night we were still in 20th place. It is a safe place to move on to the next round, but with only a tiny margin for error.

3 days to go and we are down to 21st. But, even with the FB sprint taking up most of our time I think we might be okay as all we have to do is finish in the top 25 and I don't see us being overtaken by more than 4 teams. But yes it'll be close.

21 The Scottish Boinc Team 9 years, 23 days, 5 hours, 8 minutes, 5 seconds
22 Antarctic Crunchers 8 years, 83 days, 2 hours, 41 minutes, 27 seconds
23 UserFriendly.Org 7 years, 70 days, 12 hours, 6 minutes, 21 seconds
24 BRASIL - BRAZIL@GRID 7 years, 17 days, 10 hours, 39 minutes, 25 seconds
25 AMD Users 6 years, 315 days, 2 hours, 50 minutes, 38 seconds
26 BOINCstats 4 years, 55 days, 23 hours, 11 minutes, 7 seconds
27 UK BOINC Team 3 years, 272 days, 10 hours, 29 seconds

Yup - TaaT have thrown this FB Sprint in order to beat us in Thor week 2. It is acutely personal with them.

If we do qualify for Week 3, I won't be running it at all. I'd still *like* to qualify because TaaT will probably pile CPU resources into bunkering for it

I believe I can do more good for our team in WCG, so I will be focusing here to qualify for the nwxt cot to 25 teams after this week.

Fair enough.
Based on the figures I posted in #115 I'm pretty confident we will finish in the top 25 & progress to the third week.
After that the challenge gets a bit, err challenging. To progress yet further we will have to finish in the top 10 which is a very big ask. Especially as the next FB sprint will be during that week. Most of the top WCG teams are specialist teams concentrating on WCG largely o the exclusion of other boinc projects. The main exceptions are xtremesystems and Gridcoin. Getting to week three will be a triumph in itself!

We are still 21st tonight. But to get into the top 10 I am guessing we would have to more than double our output.
My time has dropped I was doing over 40 days per 24 hours but the last 24 hours I did only 28. I do not know the reason, but hope to figure it out tomorrow. I am mostly doing Open Pandemic units.
Maybe we should start bunkering wcg soon. But what is too soon?

OP has a 7dy deadline. So 6 or 7 days from start load up and turn off network activity.

Thank you, will do.

Got off on the right foot, 25 days for the first 12 hours.

Well done.

Stats at midnight last night were:

21 The Scottish Boinc Team 10 years, 79 days, 20 hours, 28 minutes, 17 seconds
22 Antarctic Crunchers 9 years, 313 days, 15 hours, 31 minutes, 51 seconds
23 UserFriendly.Org 9 years, 21 days, 1 hour, 33 minutes, 53 seconds
24 AMD Users 8 years, 220 days, 3 hours, 34 minutes, 21 seconds
25 BRASIL - BRAZIL@GRID 8 years, 150 days, 11 hours, 18 minutes, 57 seconds
26 BOINCstats 5 years, 53 days, 21 hours, 35 minutes, 19 seconds
27 World Community Grid España 4 years, 210 days, 18 hours, 38 minutes, 36 seconds

At worst 4 teams will overtake us.
Relax. We are already qualified.

@Miklos M I think the time has come to teach you the multiple instance style of BOINC Fu

Sorry, I did not understand that.

multiple views of the same computer which can be divide the hardware resources between different projects - each one can be individually open/closed to the network (which hekps massively with bunkering)

Go for it Miklos!
The learning curve is terrifyingly steep & the Guru can get more than a little bit grumpy when your cluelessness persists at 1 a.m.!
But at the end of the day it's well worth worth it and moves your competitive BOINCing on to the next level!

Miklos M wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 9:17 pm Sorry, I did not understand that.

It's a way of running multiple copies of BOINC on your computer. I've used as many as 50 copies for some comps. You can run PrimeGrid PPS Sieve on your GPUs in one copy, load a second copy with WCG and turn off network to that copy. When that copy is done with all the WCG, the load a third copy with WCG, turn off network access and crunch it until it's done. And so on.

Currently the way your computer runs, if it only takes 1 day for your big computer to crunch a full load of WCG, then that's the most work you can pre-crunch before a competition. If you had 7 copies of boinc to work with, you could save up 7 days of work before a competition. Each copy is controlled independently from the others just like they were different computers but the do share the same computer hardware resources so you can't run 36 thread on each copy at the same time. You run one at time and then suspend it after it completes work. Then you resume the next copy and complete those WUs and so on. Noodle it a little bit and we'll start on it some time this week if you want to try it.

Thank you scole for explaining it to me step by step. I would hate to upset my Guru at 1 am :)
I would like to start next week to learn that and maybe I can bunker many wcg tasks for the next round on all computers. I would have a week's worth to crunch before the next round X4.

We are still in 21st place with 1 day to go. On another note, my computers are crunching their best day so far=61 days for the last 24 hours.

Post by Megacruncher » Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:37 pm

Go for it Miklos!
The learning curve is terrifyingly steep & the Guru can get more than a little bit grumpy when your cluelessness persists at 1 a.m.!
But at the end of the day it's well worth worth it and moves your competitive BOINCing on to the next level!
I will be sure not to be clueless after midnight.:)

#120 Re: THOR Challenge Y5 (2020)
Post by PecosRiverM » Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:26 pm

OP has a 7dy deadline. So 6 or 7 days from start load up and turn off network activity.
Sounds good, I am winding down the old tasks now so I can download the longest expiration dates.

What are the deadlines for the other WCG sub-projects?

I think Africa is the longest and then Smash Childhood Cancer. guessing by the deadline dates I have. I wonder if it would not be a bad idea to download some of them with OpenPandemic.

How did we finish in Thor this week? When will the results come out?

23 The Scottish Boinc Team 12 years, 6 days, 15 hours, 16 minutes, 33 seconds

Thank you PecosRiverM. Here we go for the third week, in a week.

If it is still run-time, I'll put the rasp pi and freebsd machine on it. Some others for while if there are WCG sub-projects with longer deadlines than remaining FB sprint projects

We have no hope of making the next 10 in Thir though (we've helped SUSA in previous years). Main value to TSBT will be seeing if TaaT put CPU resources on it

23rd and qualification for the next stage is a pretty good showing considering that it is less than 2 years since TSBT broke thru into the WCG top 100.
If it was our sole priority then top 10 in week three might just be possible.

Do we have any Sprints during that week?

The third week of the THOR challenge will take place from Monday, October 05, 2020 thru Sunday, October 11, 2020

The next Formula BOINC Sprint is 08/10/2020 15:00 (UTC) - 11/10/2020 14:59 (UTC).

Clear out your WCG caches. Set WCG to no new work. Tomorrow we load up your rigs with 7 days worth of new WCG work and close the door (turn off network activity).

I thought a couple of teams, one is Gridcoin, cannot qualify for the Final 10. Am I mistaken?

Does it help while running dark to only complete the tasks about 75% or so and then do the next one, just so all can be started prior to the deadline?

Miklos M wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 2:29 pm Does it help while running dark to only complete the tasks about 75% or so and then do the next one, just so all can be started prior to the deadline?

Most projects will let you go beyond the deadline if you've already started a WU but if you have a bunch of WUs it can be a pain to walk through all of those. Check your email

Miklos M wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 2:26 pm I thought a couple of teams, one is Gridcoin, cannot qualify for the Final 10. Am I mistaken?

Actually, I believe it is the fifth week they cannot qualify for:
THOR Challenge Pure Format

At the end of the third week of the THOR Challenge, 20 teams will be selected to participate in a fifth week of challenge called THOR Challenge Pure.

Three conditions must be fulfilled in order to be eligible for the THOR Challenge Pure:
1- Not to be a team affiliated (directly or indirectly) with a company, association, foundation, government agency, administration, university, college or school.
2- Not to be a team rewarding the distributed computing of its volunteers financially.
3- Have at least participated in the first week of the THOR Challenge (September 07 to September 13, 2020).

Among the eligible teams, the 20 teams that have accumulated the most Total Run Time during the first 3 weeks of challenge will be selected for the 5th week, the THOR Challenge Pure.

That will take out Gridcoin. It also means that there is a reason for doing well in Week 3 even if we do not intend to make week four (the top 10). We still need to be in the top twenty after three weeks to make week 5.

Gibson, thank you for the correction, you are right.

Our invitation to week three has arrived & I have accepted it.

Megacruncher wrote: ↑Wed Sep 30, 2020 1:50 pm Our invitation to week three has arrived & I have accepted it.

We will be ready to go.

Hi guys. You might want to hit week 3 hard. Last I looked you were at # 20 in qualifications for the Pure segment. Only 20 teams make it so you're on the bubble. Even if TSBT and SUSA don't make the cut in the third leg, a good showing will get us both into week 5 Pure. Good luck and have fun!

Big Al wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 3:15 am Hi guys. You might want to hit week 3 hard. Last I looked you were at # 20 in qualifications for the Pure segment. Only 20 teams make it so you're on the bubble. Even if TSBT and SUSA don't make the cut in the third leg, a good showing will get us both into week 5 Pure. Good luck and have fun!

Started working towards the second hundred tasks of Africa Rains Project in my bunkers.