Seventeen or Bust Client Update

Want to make history by finding the final 6 primes required to settle the Sierpinski Problem?

Now there’s a new version of the SB client (v27.9) available to help with that. Download it and start testing for primes today.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

14 Responses to “Seventeen or Bust Client Update”

May 20
Alexei Andreev

How many CPUs are doing this on average?
May 20
Louie Helm

Only a few hundred. Someone with access to a lot could help SB tremendously. The workunits take ~1-2 months though, so it requires significant commitment too. Running SB for a day or two on a new computer doesn’t really help.
May 20
Marius van Voorden

Yeah I was kind of surprised when it mentioned that I had a whopping 0.13% chance of finding a prime – per core!
May 21
Marius van Voorden

Louie, on my laptop (quadcore with hyperthreading), it’s only using 50%. On my desktop (quadcore, no hyperthreading) it’s using the full 100% of CPU.

There’s 4 workers on my laptop, prime95 says the first one is assigned to logical CPUs 1 & 2, the second to 3 & 4, third to 5 & 6, and the last to 7 & 8.

What I _think_ may be going on, is that the first CPU should be 1 & 5, perhaps. I’m not sure how to check.

Any ideas for how to fully use the CPU?
May 21
Marius van Voorden

Possibly it _is_ using all the processing power, but only using one of the sub-cores, which might only show up as 50%. Not sure there.
May 21
Louie Helm

It’s is using all the CPU when at 50% on a hyperthreading system. SB uses enough a CPU’s L1 and L2 cache that if it were to try hyperthreading 2 full processes on each physical CPU, it would lower total performance.
May 21
Marius van Voorden

Cool, thanks 🙂
May 22
Blake Jones

Is there a way to checkpoint and resume work? Getting multiple CPU-months is much easier if they don’t have to be uninterrupted.
May 22
Marius van Voorden

I think it already does that.
May 22
Louie Helm

Yes, it does checkpoint. I just meant that if you don’t run it on the same system for at least a month or so of CPU time, then it won’t complete a full workunit.
May 23
Marius van Voorden

I’m getting a lot of this on only one of my cores. Should I be worried?

Possible hardware errors have occurred during the test!
4 ROUNDOFF > 0.4 of which 3 were repeatable (not hardware errors).
Confidence in final result is fair.
May 23
Louie Helm

Thermal load may be impacting your CPU’s performance. SB can make processors run near their physical performance limits. You may want to make sure your CPUs are getting adequate ventilation and that more is done to cool them.
May 24
Marius van Voorden

A reasonable suggestion, but I just checked, and it’s sitting at a nice cool 55°C. That Scyte Mugen 2 cooler remains pretty awesome 🙂

That leaves the question of what is going on then though…
May 25
Marius van Voorden

The icon that indicates if you went up or down in the rankings, for Overall Rate, seems to be wrong. It’s been stuck at saying I dropped 3 slots, while I’ve most definitely been climbing. The other two ranks seem to work fine.

Not that it’s too important though.