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10th BOINC Pentathlon | May 5th-19th 2019

18K views 100 replies 21 participants last post by  Starbomba 
#1 · (Edited)

What is this event all about?

The BOINC Pentathlon is a two week long BOINC team competition. Five different projects will be crunched over the two week period.

The BOINC Pentathlon consists of 5 disciplines:

  1. Marathon (CPU, 14 days)
  2. Sprint (CPU, 3 days)
  3. City Run (CPU, 5 days)
  4. Cross Country (GPU, 5 days)
  5. Javelin (CPU, 5x1 day)

The fun and challenging aspect of the Pentathlon is resource management. The 5 "disciplines" are run over a 14 day period, so each "discipline" overlaps another discipline. Figuring out what to run, and when to run it, is what makes the Pentathlon a unique and challenging BOINC points race.

  • Run-times and projects for each discipline are announced 5 days (Marathon and one other project) or 3 days (Sprint and one other project) before their respective start. Each day of Javelin Throw will be announced three days in advance. Announcements can be found on the, main page, via Blog, or Feed .
  • This allows some time to stock up on completed WU's, but it can also be dangerous if you forget to turn in the completed tasks before the deadline. It also adds another twist to resource management, if you are trying to stockpile WU's, while simultaneously running the current active disciplines.


New to BOINC?

Check out the BOINC Essentials Thread for information about BOINC, how to install and use the BOINC client, and what projects are available on the BOINC platform.


Promote the BOINC Pentathlon in your forum signature!

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[CENTER]:boxing3:[URL=https://www.overclock.net/forum/365-overclock-net-boinc-team/1724592-10th-boinc-pentathlon-may-5th-19th-2019-a.html][B]10th  BOINC Pentathlon - May 5th-19th,  2019[/B][/URL]:boxing3:[/CENTER]


Disciplines to crunch:

OCN Final Overall Ranking: 11th

Marathon (CPU): World Community Grid | Sub-Project: OpenZika

OCN Final Ranking - 14
Starts: 5/5
Ends: 5/19
Project Support Thread

Sprint (CPU): LHC@Home
OCN Final Ranking - 10th
Starts: 5/16
Ends: 5/19
Project Support Thread

City Run (CPU): yoyo@home
OCN Final Ranking - 11th
Starts: 5/6
Ends: 5/11
Project Support Thread

Cross Country (GPU): Einstein@Home
OCN Final Ranking - 10th
Starts: 5/11
Ends: 5/16
Project Support Thread

Javelin Throw (CPU): NFS@Home
OCN Final Ranking - 10th
Starts: Various Start Times
Ends: Various End Times
Project Support Thread

Project Choosing Rules
Each team may suggest four Projects while signing up. The projects are assigned to the disciplines as follows:

  1. Marathon
    • Subproject of World Community Grid. The project is set by the organizers.
  2. Sprint
    • CPU or GPU with a quorum of 1.
  3. City Run
    • CPU project
  4. Cross Country
    • CPU or GPU project
  5. Javelin Throw
    • CPU or GPU project with a quorum of 1
Each team may cast four votes for projects from the pre-selection below while signing up. These votes will be taken into account for the final project choice. However, only one discipline can take place at a GPU project, and only projects that provide workunits with a quorum of 1 can be chosen for Sprint and Javelin Throw. The projects chosen for the Pentathlon will therefore not necessarily be the four projects with the most votes.

Quorum 1 | CPU: Cosmology@Home, LHC@Home, NFS@Home, SRBase, YAFU, yoyo@home | GPU: Collatz Conjecture
Quorum 2 | CPU: *Amicable Numbers, RakeSearch | GPU: Einstein@Home, SETI@Home
* Amicable Numbers is listed as a CPU project this year, because the GPU application is relatively inefficient and uses very much CPU time at the moment.
Projects are not eligible if they

  • were chosen in last year's Pentathlon (Asteroids@Home, NumberFields@Home, PrimeGrid, Rosetta@home, Universe@home)
  • cannot provide a sufficient number of workunits
  • do not support at least Windows and Linux
  • provide non-CPU-intensive (NCI) applications
  • use buggy or test-only applications
  • do not allow the creation of new accounts
  • do not support WebRPC
To keep it as transparent as possible, we will publish the suggestions of every team when announcing the final project.

OCN Project Nominations:


  • Sprint - yoyo
  • City Run - LHC
  • Cross Country - Einstein
  • Javelin Throw - SRBase

To be eligible for the prize drawing, sign up and fill out the form at the following link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd9JrLQr_UWl0FJb7jebsWOPyxHbFX9Aj59Dt9B8AQO0GFnJw/viewform

Prizes Being Donated for the Pentathlon:

$50 Paypal - Donated by Overclock.net
Winner:
$25 Paypal - Donated by Overclock.net
Winner:
$25 Paypal - Donated by Overclock.net
Winner:
$25 Paypal - Donated by Overclock.net
Winner:

Sponsors:
TBD
 
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2
#5 ·
Stopped in to say hi, but unknown if I'll be able to participate much this year, since most of the hardware is currently out of commission.
 
#6 ·
I hope the GPU project will be Einstein. I just installed the lastest Kubuntu on my desktop (blasphemy..I know...being a Gentoo user..and I kinda like it...:guiltysmi) so I can try out ROCm with my Radeon vii. The only project that works using it is Einstein. Everything else ends in computation errors.

I still need to take the blocks off my 1070ti's that were in my desktop so I can put them in CrunchAholic.
 
#8 ·
Yeah, much as I'd love to help out, I don't think I'll be able to justify the higher power bill running a rig or two would wind up wracking up running for two weeks straight. There's a chance such might change, but... Ah unno. I'll go with "saddened by some news I was given today", even if saddened is just a polite way of saying how I actually feel about it.
 
#11 ·
I just got Rocm working on Gentoo. Kubuntu makes me feel dirty. :p Maybe I'll put Arch on that NVMe. My stock air cooled Radeon vii on Rocm drivers currently completes 2 Einstein tasks in 6m05s. Hopefully I can get around to putting on the water block tomorrow.
 
#16 ·
I saw the same thing running BOINC and a large number of other OpenCL compute projects on Rocm. I have Rocm running in Arch with my Radeon VII, but I think that I will be going back to the OpenCL driver from AMDGPU-Pro.

I have the Rocm OpenCL runtime and driver, but compatibility is really limited compared to the closed source driver. :thumbsdow
 
#18 ·
They will pretty much have to tell us the Javelin CPU project pretty soon, 24 - 48 hours from now. I assume we will learn what this is next. This 5x1 days with 3 days notice sounds like 20 days of work unless the periods overlap, maybe they have to overlap. Counting the third best day is interesting too. From a strategy perspective I wonder if we almost need to pick three periods to run it, or to turn work in, as a team to do well here.
 
#21 ·
Who can guess what the organizers have in mind? I would not be surprised to see at least one instance of consecutive days. It is only safe to assume a full bunker is possible for the first run. In that case, sitting out the 2nd consecutive day makes sense. However, if I were scheduling, I would do so in such a way that a 3 day bunker is only possible on the first and last runs. The possibilities are almost endless. This should be fun.....
 
#20 ·
Unless I'm missing something, why even run it more than 3x? If we give it our all for an agreed upon 3 instances (in whatever order), it seems like wasted effort and an unnecessary diversion of resources to run it a 4th or 5th time. That being said, it will be fun to watch all the sandbagging the event is sure to produce.
 
#23 ·
Good to see this thread come alive, and see some familiar names. :)

I am glad to see your team is wondering why to run more than 3 of the Javelin events. AnandTech and [H] are scratching heads as well. (Each gets announced 3 days prior to start and each starts at 0000 UTC)

Keeping an eye on https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/start.php , and I almost fully expect to see the Javelin announced at the 3 day mark. But that would spoil some of the surprise, wouldn't it?
 
#25 ·
So looks like my 6900k will finally get to truely stretch it's legs. I'll finish my sign up when I get home and find my info I have stored on an external drive. Also might have a 3770 & 4770 that I can get up and running for this as well (5930k is hiding in storage somewhere)
Also might be able to lend the 1080ti, RX 580, GTX 960 & 1050 to the cause too.
 
#26 ·
Signed up. Not sure if I'll be able to participate every day, but I'll do what I can.
 
#27 ·
I had a little scare today. I thought I either killed my 2p or a pair of 1070ti FTW's. Last night I took the waterblocks off of the two 1070ti's so I could put them in my 2p. Today, when I got home from work I put in the two cards, which was a pain....I had to stand on a bucket to get them in. I have the case a little too high up in the rack..but anyway...I went to my desktop to ssh into the machine and I got nothing. Then I went back downstairs and hooked up a monitor, but the 2p didn't post.

So I took out one card and tried again, still didn't post. Took out the second one and it posted...ok that's a start. I didn't fry the 2p but the gpu's weren't working. I tried flip flopping cards into different slots and got nothing. Now I'm thinking somehow i ruined two gpu's. I booted the machine without the cards and went into the bios to search for any sort of clue as to why it wouldn't post when I added a gpu. Then I saw it, PCIe slots were set to Gen2. I set them to Gen3 and everything was right with the world again. :D
 
#28 · (Edited)
Good to hear that everything is up and running, and no hardware was lost. :D

That is an odd error. The cards should have still run at PCI-e 2.0.
On my Ivy Xeons, if I have more than two GPUs in the machine, I have to run at PCI-e 2.0 or I will have tons of PCI-e errors and random lock-ups.
No issues running 1070s or 1080s at PCI-e 2.0. :thinking:
 
#29 ·
I don't know. I didn't have any problem with the Rx 480 that I had a few years ago with it set to Gen2. Maybe it's something specific to the FTW cards and the slave bios that I have it set to, or it's just a weird coincidence that it started working. It's working now that's all I care about.
 
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