Suddenly I'm getting only trivial TF tests

[fivemack]

I decided that probably it was more sensible on my slightly-old 12-physical-core hardware to run 12 double-checks, one per thread, rather than one double-check over 12 threads.

I edited local.txt to have WorkerThreads=12 ThreadsPerTest=1 rather than the other way around, and restarted mprime

And it started collecting trial-factor-to-67-bits jobs for numbers around 212.383 million, fifteen for each of the eleven threads that weren't working on the single double-check that I had assigned. Each of these jobs seems to take about 55 minutes; presumably they'd take a few minutes on a GPU, so I can't see why I'm doing them at all.

This is odd, because I have WorkPreference=101 which I thought meant 'only give me double-checks'; is hardware which takes twenty days to do a double-check (but which will do twelve double-checks in parallel over those twenty days) now so totally obsolete that it should be given only make-work?

[lycorn]

"... is hardware which takes twenty days to do a double-check (but which will do twelve double-checks in parallel over those twenty days) now so totally obsolete that it should be given only make-work?"

Certainly not. Log in to Primenet Server, go to My Account -> CPUs and make sure the correct work type is selected for all threads on that particular machine.

[ATH]

You can also check the settings here:
http://www.mersenne.org/thresholds/?setting=1

if you log in with your account.

[lycorn]

That only means that, in case you choose LL or DC work, you´ll get the smallest available numbers, if your machine meets the stated requirements.
To actually check what type of work the server will assign, you better look at the page I mentioned in my previous post.

[fivemack]

Originally Posted by lycorn

"... is hardware which takes twenty days to do a double-check (but which will do twelve double-checks in parallel over those twenty days) now so totally obsolete that it should be given only make-work?"

Certainly not. Log in to Primenet Server, go to My Account -> CPUs and make sure the correct work type is selected for all threads on that particular machine.

On the CPUs page the line for the computer says 'D' under preferred work type; but when I go to the page for the specific computer it has one thread down as D and all the rest as TF-LMH. I have set them all to 'D' and will see what happens - there's no immediate reaction, but I guess I have fifteen hours * 11 cores of p~212M TF-to-2^67 queued up.

I was expecting that anything I set in local.txt would override anything the server might decide, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the specific situation where I increase the number of workers on a single computer.

There seem to be rather more computers doing TF-LMH jobs than I would expect given how well-suited those jobs are to GPU, so I wonder if this bug has bitten other people - could someone with database access check if there are many computers with all-but-one thread doing TF-LMH?

[lycorn]

Originally Posted by fivemack

On the CPUs page the line for the computer says 'D' under preferred work type; but when I go to the page for the specific computer it has one thread down as D and all the rest as TF-LMH. I have set them all to 'D' and will see what happens

Bingo! I´m quite sure that will do the trick.

[fivemack]

It did - I now have nine DC tasks queued on that computer, I'm sure it will go up to twelve as the queue of TF-LMH ones drains

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by fivemack

...could someone with database access check if there are many computers with all-but-one thread doing TF-LMH?

I did a quick check...
8423 machines (from non anonymous users) have more than one work type.

A bunch of 8 different work types...they're really covering their bases I guess. One anonymous user's CPU had 11 different kinds spread between the different workers (32 total workers). That's when I decided not to count anon users, but if you did, the total CPUs with multiple types goes up to 11,455.

[retina]

Perhaps the real question here should be why is TF being given out to ordinary CPUs as a default work type?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by retina

Perhaps the real question here should be why is TF being given out to ordinary CPUs as a default work type?

Yes.

[fivemack]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I did a quick check...
8423 machines (from non anonymous users) have more than one work type.

A bunch of 8 different work types...they're really covering their bases I guess. One anonymous user's CPU had 11 different kinds spread between the different workers (32 total workers). That's when I decided not to count anon users, but if you did, the total CPUs with multiple types goes up to 11,455.

Thanks for that. Is there any way you can do the more specific query of whether a user has precisely two work types, with one of them running on only one core? I think there is actually an underlying bug here - when you increase the number of cores by editing local.txt, the new ones get allocated the wrong work type.