How do I move work assignments to faster computer with fewer cores?

[jdmcs]

I am currently running Prime95 28.5 on a 12-core X5670-based Mac Pro, but would like to move these twelve (almost half completed) work assignments to my Windows PC that has a quad core i7-4770 processor.

I thought that I could simply move all of the worker files from the Mac Pro to the Windows computer, and Prime95 on the Windows computer happily continued crunching on the first four assignments at a much faster rate, but Prime95 warned me that the worktodo.txt file had an invalid worker number. So I convinced myself that I did it wrong and moved the files back to the Mac Pro (which again seemed to happily continue crunching on all 12 assignments).

Is there a way to move these 12 assignments to my PC such that it will queue the extra assignments and complete them as others finish? Or if that is not possible, is there a way I can move four of the assignments to my PC and have my Mac Pro complete the other eight without requesting new assignments?

[Mark Rose]

Try this:

Stop Prime95
Rename worktodo.txt to worktodo.add
Remove all the [Worker #N] lines
Start Prime95

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Try this:

Stop Prime95

This might work cleaner:
Copy all of the pXXXXXXXX, rXXXXXXXX, mXXXXXXXXX, and fXXXXXXXXX files to the new machine's Prime95 folder.
Take the worktodo.txt from the old machine, goto to James H's wonderful website's "Worktodo Balancer page", paste the contents of the file into the window. Select 4 workers and any other options you want. Hit "process". Take the results of the and paste into a worktodo.add (on the new machine) as above. Then stop and start Prime95 on the new machine.

If you want to you can blend the worktodo files from both machines.
Copy save files as above.
Stop Prime95 on the new machine (exiting it is good practice, but not required.)
Paste the contents of both worktodo files into the window on the website.
Select options, hit "Process".
Copy new results and use this to replace the contents of the worktodo.txt file on the new machine. Save the file.
Restart Prime95 on the new machine.

[NBtarheel_33]

Uncwilly has the right idea. You want to balance the remaining work over the four cores. If you simply compile all of the assignment lines into a worktodo file with no worker divisions, Prime95 will assume that you want to process all of the remaining work on a single core, and will then pull new assignments for the other three cores. The problem is that when Prime95 communicates with the server, the core with twelve assignments will dump several of them (i.e. they will no longer be assigned to you) because the estimated completion dates will be so far out. You would then either have to waste the work on those exponents thus far, or else continue working on them anyway, which would have poaching ramifications if they should be assigned to another user in the meantime.

[LaurV]

Just to make it clear, Mark's solution says to make the file worktodo.add (not .txt), which means P95 itself will distribute the work to the 4 workers, doing balancing and whatever. The solutions are (reasonably) equivalent. I usually stop p95 and edit the worktodo manually, distributing the work for the workers i like, adding workers, deleting them, eventually changing the number of workers in local.txt (WorkerThreads=x, ThreadsPerTest=y, possibly MaxHighMemWorkers=z when P-1, etc), then restart p95.

[edit: and to make it clear, by "stop" and "exit", me and all the guys above me, mean to click the test menu, then select "stop", or "exit". Clicking the red x in the upper right corner will not stop p95, but minimizing it in background (and taskbar) only, but the program will still run]

[TheMawn]

Originally Posted by jdmcs

I am currently running Prime95 28.5 on a 12-core X5670-based Mac Pro, but would like to move these twelve (almost half completed) work assignments to my Windows PC that has a quad core i7-4770 processor.

I thought that I could simply move all of the worker files from the Mac Pro to the Windows computer, and Prime95 on the Windows computer happily continued crunching on the first four assignments at a much faster rate, but Prime95 warned me that the worktodo.txt file had an invalid worker number. So I convinced myself that I did it wrong and moved the files back to the Mac Pro (which again seemed to happily continue crunching on all 12 assignments).

Is there a way to move these 12 assignments to my PC such that it will queue the extra assignments and complete them as others finish? Or if that is not possible, is there a way I can move four of the assignments to my PC and have my Mac Pro complete the other eight without requesting new assignments?

The problem you have is that the worktodo.txt contains the current (and possible future) work for each worker. Each worker is assigned to one core of the CPU assuming the "affinity" is appropriately set, which it almost always is.

In going from a 12-core to a 4-core, workers 1 through 4 are fine but worker 5 doesn't know what to do because there isn't a 5th core for it to be assigned to, hence the problems.

Using worktodo.add or the balancer or manual edits, you cram the 12 assignments back down to 4 workers. You can't efficiently work on all twelve so you need to do 4 at a time. The save files don't care about any of this though, so if you keep them in your folder, when the first four jobs finish and the next four start, they will find the half-finished jobs and continue working from there.


By the way, if you're interested, you can keep maybe 4 jobs running on your Xeon, and they'll probably work much faster than when you had 12.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Just to make it clear, Mark's solution says to make the file worktodo.add (not .txt), which means P95 itself will distribute the work to the 4 workers, doing balancing and whatever.

I tried that earlier today and it did not do that. I was refilling the worktodo of a borg. With no sections in the worktodo.add, it sucked them all into the first worker.

@TheMawn, by using the Worktodo Balancer page, you select the number of workers. It is often much better than doing the job by hand. Depending the situation I use it about once every 2 months per box just to get things all tidy.


James H. Is it possible to have the balancer to detect duplicate assignments and eliminate them (with an understanding that it won't apply to ECM)?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Try this:

Stop Prime95
Rename worktodo.txt to worktodo.add
Remove all the [Worker #N] lines
Start Prime95

I was under the impression that you should not just Stop Prime95, but close down the program, too. Maybe this only applies to prime.txt and local.txt. Worktodo.add has to have the same worker sections as worktodo.txt, for sure. But I thought that if you really wanted to muck around in the working files of P95, the program had to close, lest it undo your changes the next time it updated the file.

Am I lost in the ozone again on this point?

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kladner

Am I lost in the ozone again on this point?

Remember we are talking about transferring work between 2 machines. You can monkey around with Worktodo.txt while Prime95 is stopped. I do it all of the time.

[kladner]

Great photo!

Thanks for the correction.