You just might be addicted to GIMPS if...

[vikingpower]

...you SELL your car in order to throw more CPUs @ M334214459 ( Yes, you will only ride the subway and "Strassenbahn" after that. What the heck. )

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by chappy

...you use the exhaust of your laptop to keep your lunch warm...

...you use the power supply for your laptop to keep your coffee cup warm.

[Uncwilly]

.... you dream that one of your machines finds a ~260 bit factor while doing P-1, that is a composite, but the largest factor in it is still a personal best of > 100 bits. (Happened to me last night.)

[Uncwilly]

....silence near your computer worries you.

[kracker]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

....silence near your computer worries you.

BS! Everyone has that... including me!....Right guys....right?

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kracker

BS! Everyone has that... including me!....Right guys....right?

I have been doing some video rendering of late. When I start a session, I turn off Prime95 to make it go faster (the rendering engine goes from 60% CPU usage to ~98% and the rendering time drops.) When I hear the fan drop off, I know the job is done. The silence seems odd.

[chappy]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

... I turn off Prime95 to make it go faster ...

you might be addicted to GIMPS if this makes you feel a little betrayed. :)

[Xyzzy]

When I start a session, I turn off Prime95 to make it go faster (the rendering engine goes from 60% CPU usage to ~98% and the rendering time drops.) When I hear the fan drop off, I know the job is done. The silence seems odd.

In rare cases, users have reported the program can interfere with the performance of some programs such as disk defragmenters and some games. You can pause the program automatically when these programs are running by adding this line to prime.txt:

PauseWhileRunning=prog1[n1],prog2[n2],etc

The [n1], [n2] values are optional and indicate the number of worker threads to pause when prog1 and prog2 are running. The default value for n1 and n2 is to pause all worker threads. Note that the program will pause if the program name matches any part of the running program's file name. That is "foobar" will match "c:\foobar.exe", "C:\FOOBAR\name.exe", and even "C:\myfoobarprog.exe". Also, if prog1 is "*" the program will pause no matter what. Examples:

PauseWhileRunning=*[1] during 6-7/2:00-3:00
PauseWhileRunning=* during 23:00-24:00 else decomp[1],mygame[2]

The first example pauses one worker thread on Saturday and Sunday between 2AM and 3AM. The second example pauses all workers between 11PM and 12AM and pauses 1 worker if decomp is running and 2 if mygame is running.

LowMemWhileRunning is similar to PauseWhileRunning. This option does not allow workers use a lot of memory. This example, will make sure the program is using the minimum amount of memory possible while photoshop is running:

LowMemWhileRunning=Photoshop

By default, the program will check the PauseWhileRunning list every 10 seconds. You can adjust the time period with this prime.txt setting:

PauseCheckInterval=n

where n is the number of seconds between checking which programs are running.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Yes, but if I am watching the telly while the rendering job is in action, the fan quieting down let's me know it is time to return to the keyboard and set up the next rendering job. At the moment the real life work of video editing, rendering, and posting to the web take precedent. (Working on having ~78 episodes that are ~28 minutes, rendered and posted as quickly as possible.)

[chalsall]

You KNOW you're addicted to GIMPS when you spin up several EC2 g2.2xlarge instances to feed the DC'ers, so you don't have to bring your TF'ing for LL'ing trading partner's "Let GPU72 decide" GPUs away from the LL range...

For anyone interested, these instances supply one half of a NVidia GRID K520 (GK104), able to produce ~220 GHzd/d in the current DC TF'ing range (and not a bad amount of CPU LL'ing either). All for USD ~8.2 cents an hour ("spot instances" in Tokyo -- they can go away at any moment; thus I have the home directory for each instance configured with a persistent ECS volume).

I haven't done the math recently, but I suspect it is actually currently less expensive for me to do this than to simply run GPUs here in Barbados (because of our high electrical costs), not even factoring in (no joke intended) the capital costs of the hardware.

@James: please let me know if you'd like benchmarks, and exactly what I should run and report.

P.S. This is sooooo much fun!!!

[TheMawn]

You might be addicted to GIMPS when this is you:

(I felt like being overdramatic this morning but it occurred to me certain individuals might have been entirely serious)