Hi!

I was not able to find an answer so I am posting here to ask!

I know some projects discourage Hyper-threading on CPU's for certain tasks because it makes them slower/produce bad results.

Excluding the issues from heat generation from HT, is there a problem with using HT for this project?

Best,

Prescott

Hi!

I was not able to find an answer so I am posting here to ask!

I know some projects discourage Hyper-threading on CPU's for certain tasks because it makes them slower/produce bad results.

Excluding the issues from heat generation from HT, is there a problem with using HT for this project?

Best,

Prescott

There is not a problem with HT, but tasks will run approximately 2 times longer. I did some stats on this several years ago and found that the average run times were about 1.9x (as best as I can remember). So there is a small improvement, but I personally didn't think it was worth the extra load on the CPU. Other things to keep in mind is the code has changed since my original tests and HT on newer CPUs may be better now.

Thanks for the quick reply Eric!

I will give it a try and let you know!

If you wanted to do a quick timing test yourself, you can use the "Remaining (estimated)" column in the boinc manager. This value for an unstarted task is a good estimate of the average run time. Just make sure you have run a sufficient number of WUs so that the average is accurate (several hundred WUs should be good). Do it once for single threaded tasks, and then again for hyper-threaded tasks, and then compare the numbers.

If you wanted to do a quick timing test yourself, you can use the "Remaining (estimated)" column in the boinc manager. This value for an unstarted task is a good estimate of the average run time. Just make sure you have run a sufficient number of WUs so that the average is accurate (several hundred WUs should be good). Do it once for single threaded tasks, and then again for hyper-threaded tasks, and then compare the numbers.

Preliminary data suggests a 58% increase in estimated time to completion based on BOINC estimated time to complete after several hundred WUs.

The WU set they have been crunching is 4 Cobblestones less than the previous set and is only searching to 16 Cvec.

Overall, it appears that it is completing more, but without additional data I cannot say for sure.

If you wanted to do a quick timing test yourself, you can use the "Remaining (estimated)" column in the boinc manager. This value for an unstarted task is a good estimate of the average run time. Just make sure you have run a sufficient number of WUs so that the average is accurate (several hundred WUs should be good). Do it once for single threaded tasks, and then again for hyper-threaded tasks, and then compare the numbers.

Preliminary data suggests a 58% increase in estimated time to completion based on BOINC estimated time to complete after several hundred WUs.

The WU set they have been crunching is 4 Cobblestones less than the previous set and is only searching to 16 Cvec.

Overall, it appears that it is completing more, but without additional data I cannot say for sure.

That sounds like a nice improvement, definitely better than what I saw years ago.