Project Update

[Dingo]

What shipped this week (week 40)
andy

A round up of what has changed on the site this week. There is a new client, 3.4.2, on every channel.

Client

The client has a full-screen dashboard. Started from a terminal, it now fills the window with four views, switched with 1 to 4 or Tab:

Work: a summary (tests running and queued, tests finished per hour, average test time), then each running test with its progress, speed, time left and expected finish, then the work waiting to start. A test with no progress for 20 minutes is marked stalled, and one running well behind the others is marked slow. With more tests than fit on screen it switches to a grid, then a map.
Results: every test finished this session, with its outcome, RES64 and when the server received it.
Log: the client's messages, which used to scroll past underneath.
Machine: version, process count, backlog, update channel and where the settings come from.
r sends results and progress straight away (at most once a minute), p pauses downloads, and q twice or Ctrl+C saves and quits. Under a service manager, or with -tui=false, the output is plain timestamped lines as before. The help page has the details.

It draws correctly in the old Windows console. The console window Windows opens outside Windows Terminal has no fallback font, so parts of the progress bars and the map came out as question marks. On Windows outside Windows Terminal the dashboard now uses only characters that console has. Thanks to @Goldrush8 for the help debugging the client on Windows.

You can keep your own record of results. Start the client with -results and it appends a line for every test the machine completes, with the residue, to a file that is never trimmed or rotated. Formats are jsonl (the default), prst and prpclient, plus extended versions of the last two. The setting is saved, so it stays on across restarts. @garyg asked for this in I need a little more info.

The log is smaller, about 220 bytes per test instead of 2 KB. The request bodies and connection details moved to debug level.

Work allocation

Machines with nothing to do no longer get k = 999. Until this week, a machine whose work ranges gave it nothing was handed k = 999, and a member who had set nothing up only ever worked that k. k = 999 is now an ordinary reservation. Every member has a Smallest available work row at the bottom of their work ranges instead, which takes the lowest untested n in the project, the same as the sweep. You can delete it.

If your work ranges do run dry, the machine gets no work and is told why. 3.4.2 shows the reason once and says when work is back. If it lasts more than 15 minutes and one of your machines was seen in the last day, you get one email about it.

Smallest available work ignores "Don't issue candidates that might have been tested elsewhere". That setting still applies to your other ranges.

The sweep

The sweep is in the cell at n = 280,000, and the band from 200,000 to 299,999 is 90.5% done, up from 74.8% a week ago.

Primes

@NanotechSci found the first megaprime on primecrunch by anyone other than me:
2,027
·
2
3,503,676
−
1
, 1,054,715 digits.

Recent primes is a new page listing primes confirmed on primecrunch, newest first: the 1,099 that were discoveries, or all 143,066 with "Include verified and unknown results" switched on.

Top primes loads in about a fifth of a second instead of 6 seconds, and the prover code has its own column.

Public profiles show the primes a member discovered in each 500,000-wide n band, next to the cells they led. @Carlos asked for this in Top Crunchers.

Prime families show "tested to" exactly, to the last whole 10,000 segment (for example 4,299,999), instead of rounded to 250,000.

k pages show the completed frontier to the nearest 10,000 too, so a k moves as soon as each segment finishes rather than once per 500,000.

If you find a prime that is waiting to be reported to t5k, its candidate page shows it to you when you are signed in.

Dashboard and Jobs

An activity calendar on the dashboard shades each day by your TeraOps, one calendar per year, with the number of days you crunched in the last year and your current run. The TeraOps chart above it covers the same 365 days and adds a 7-day average.

Jobs and Queued can be grouped by k, alongside machine and type.

Top Crunchers lists everyone, all time and for each month, rather than stopping at the top 10.

Pages, help and forum

Getting started is rebuilt as numbered steps, with a switch for Windows, macOS and Linux.

"How this page works" links now sit at the top right of each page, and the summary figures at the top of Jobs, Machines, Work ranges, My Primes, Territory and the sweep use one compact layout.

Every help heading has its own link. Hover over a heading and click the # beside it.

Running two copies of the client on one machine is in the help, after @Carlos asked how to split one machine between the sweep and his own ranges.

The white flash before dark mode when a page loads is gone. @PDW reported it in last week's thread: the page did not pick its theme until all of the site's JavaScript had run.

The forum list shows who has posted in each thread, as up to five avatars (the starter, then the most recent), with a name on hover.

The ranges sheet fits the window, with the k header staying in view as you scroll.

Stats that stalled overnight. The nightly backup held locks that some stats rebuilds were waiting on, so they timed out and those figures stayed stale until the next run. The backup now skips those tables, which are rebuilt from the others anyway.

[Dingo]

Cruncher Pete has joined the Team so now we are three members.  The Team is in 2rd place overall up from 3rd recently.

Rank	Team	Members	Last 30 Days	TeraOps
1	Ukraine	1	943,313	1,944,059
2	BOINC-AUSTRALIA	3	588,895	793,270
3	mersenneforum.org	2	443,864	787,565
4	HWBOT.org	1	252,955	332,142
5	nein	3	33,437	182,556
6	AMD Users	1	0	10,327

[Dingo]

What shipped this week (week 41)
andy
andy
8 hours ago
0
A round up of what has changed on the site this week. The client is now 3.4.14 on every channel.

Client

Tests can run on more than one thread. Until now every test ran on one thread, one test per core. Start the client with -calibrate on-demand and it gives each test one thread or several, whichever it has measured as getting the most done on this machine. The first time it meets an FFT size it has not measured, it pauses the running tests for a few minutes, tries the splits, and then carries on from where they stopped. The results go in thread-hints.json, so each size is measured once. Small tests still run best one per core. At large n it can be a lot more: on one 8-core machine, two tests of 4 threads did two and a half times as many 720K-FFT tests an hour as eight tests of 1. It is off unless you ask for it.

-p auto lets the client choose how many threads to fill. On a CPU with hyperthreading, running more threads than cores sometimes helps and sometimes hurts, depending on the FFT size. With -p auto the client measures each size on the physical cores, halfway to the hardware threads, and all of them, and uses whichever gets the most done. On the machines page, tick Auto in place of a thread count to do the same for a machine under remote control. @gd_barnes suggested measuring totals between the core count and the thread count in the benchmark thread.

crunch -benchmark measures how many tests an hour your machine gets through with its cores split into tests of one thread or several, at five sizes, and writes a file you can paste into the forum. It runs offline and does not touch your work. Thanks to @garyg, @3C-714, @Floof Dynomyte and @Stef42 for posting results in Benchmark your machine; they are what the thread choice above is built on.

The dashboard shows processes and threads, in total and for each test, and says what it is measuring while it calibrates.

Two fixes:

On Windows, a test the client meant to stop (to re-plan threads, calibrate or cancel work) kept running in the background. It now stops, and carries on from its last periodic save.
A self-update could restart with a prst still running from before the restart. The client now stops taking work, then stops prst, before it restarts.
The client help has the details on all of the above.