Hey Nudgey, yea you can and it does help a little but it's much more productive to tune your settings for best results. A bit of reading and testing is required to see which setting work best for each GPU you have but it's by far the best way to go. It's possible to increase production close to 2 fold maybe even more depending on the GPU your using. It's a large increase over running multiple Wu's.
The settings file can be found in the collatz folder (boinc.thesonntags.com_collatz) which is can be found in the boinc data directory.
The file name will be similar to the GPU app that your using. EG: For AMD cards it's a text file called.. collatz_sieve_1.30_windows_x86_64__opencl_ati_gpu.config
For Nvidia Cards it's collatz_sieve_1.30_windows_x86_64__opencl_nvidia_gpu.config
If you like you can try a few settings you find in this thread.
https://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/forum_thread.php?id=8#69These are the setting I use.
For the AMD radeon VII .
verbose=1
kernels_per_reduction=48
threads=8
lut_size=18
sleep=0
cache_sieve=1
reduce_cpu=0
sieve_size=29
For all my Nvidia cards.
verbose=1
kernels_per_reduction=48
threads=8
lut_size=17
sleep=1 <-- try this setting with 1 or 0 to see which is best for you.(only needed for Nvidia cards )
cache_sieve=1
reduce_cpu=0
sieve_size=29
The two most important settings are...
lut_size= <-- Try increasing this number +1 at a time until your times start getting slower or ---
you get a compute errors. Then back down 1 number.
sieve_size= <- same with this setting as with the above.
Give it a try it's not as hard as it sounds. Plus the extra credit is unbelievable.
First download some work and then run a few tasks to see what your baseline is. Then suspend all work and add the new settings to the above mentioned .config file.(edit the .config file using notepad).
After the settings have been inserted and saved click on the "options" menu in boinc manager and click the menu item that says "read config file" then suspend just one task and see how it runs.
If it fails with a computation error then try lowering both the lut_size and sieve_size settings by 3 if those settings work then try raising each setting +1 at at time until you have the best setting possible. If it fails again try lowing those two setting one number lower and try again ect.
It's also possible to see the settings others are using by simply looking at their tasks output on the collatz website. So if you find someone with a similar GPU than you have that seems to be doing a lot better than you you can try his settings. Well you can unless that person hides their devices(in the top computer ranking the host is marked as Anonymous)
This is the first guy I could find who was not anonymous in the top lists with a 1080 ti like yours .
https://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/results.php?hostid=846624&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid= Click on any of his work units in the "task" column. It should look like this...
https://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/result.php?resultid=43732560 If you scroll down the page you'll get to the part we are after. It's in the box called Stderr output.
You can see the settings he used in his .config file
verbose 1 (yes)
kernels/reduction 48
threads 2^8 (256)
lut_size 17 (1048576 bytes)
sieve_size 2^30 (51085096 bytes)
sleep 1
cache_sieve 1 (yes)
reducecpu 0 (no)
Which translates almost exactly to the settings he used in his .config file.
verbose 1
kernels/reduction 48
threads 8
lut_size 17
sieve_size 30
sleep 1
cache_sieve 1
reducecpu 0
I hope this helps. Post if you have any difficulties.
