Posts by Eric Driver

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Ubout the uncalculated 6th field (Message 3884)
Posted 10 days ago by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
General question about the problem of calculating Galois fields. More precisely about the uncalculated 6th field.

And the scientific, practical result will be obtained only if the entire problem is calculated?

And those parts of the problem that have already been calculated, such as DS15x10 DS14x11 DS14x7 and all the others already calculated, see the table: https://numberfields.asu.edu/NumberFields/batch_status.html

Do they have any scientific/practical result / value in themselves or, until the problem is completed entirely, then no?


The finished sub-cases allow us to talk about completeness at a finer resolution. For example, once sf6_DS15x11 is complete, we will be able to say that we have found all decic fields having ℚ(√10) as a subfield and with a specific discriminant bound (for DS15x11, the power of 2 in the discriminant is bounded by 2^33 and the power of 5 is bounded by 5^18). Note that the maximum bound possible is (2^34)*(5^19) and this corresponds to the DS16x12 case.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Low Nvidia GPU utilization (Message 3882)
Posted 13 days ago by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
Only running WU's on my RTX 3060 Nvidia GPU, but the utilization is often not at or close to 100%, being all over the place, over 90%, then 70 or 60, or even down to 20's or 30's sometimes.

Can this be improved?

Yes, you need to run more than 1 GPU task at the same time. See this thread for how to set the app_config.xml file:
https://numberfields.asu.edu/NumberFields/forum_thread.php?id=558
3) Message boards : News : New GPU OpenCL versions available (Message 3879)
Posted 7 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
BTW: Which version of source code is canonical(deployed) one? There's "GetDecicsSrc" and then "Mingw64" and they differ.

So they should be the same. It's been a while, so I just did a quick look to refresh my memory. In the GetDecicsSrc directory there is a shell script called makeMingw64.sh which copies the source code into the Mingw64 directory and then invokes the make script for each gpu version. I suspect there may have been a minor change to the source code which never made it into the mingw64 build (redistributing all the apps for a small tweak is not necessarily a good idea in a stable project).

So the short answer to your question is that the code in the GetDecicsSrc directory is the "canonical" one.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : No support for NVidia 5000 series? (Message 3877)
Posted 6 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I found this in the Nvidia docs:
The NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture retains and extends the same CUDA programming model provided by previous NVIDIA GPU architectures such as NVIDIA Ampere and Turing architectures

So the app should be compatible with the newer 5000 series GPUs. It's possible that the code is ignoring one of the stricter rules, and the newer CUDA implementation is now enforcing it, causing the error. When I find some time in the next couple weeks I will try to rebuild the code with the latest CUDA library.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : No support for NVidia 5000 series? (Message 3875)
Posted 6 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
It looks like you are the only one running the linux CUDA version. CUDA is supposed to be backwards compatible, unless they recently changed that with the 5000 series cards. Any chance your Nvidia driver is outdated?

I take that back. There is now a 2nd user with a 5070Ti with the same error as you. So it's not just you...
6) Message boards : Number crunching : No support for NVidia 5000 series? (Message 3874)
Posted 6 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I checked the database and there are successful results for 5000 series cards, but they are all with the Windows OpenCL version of the app.

It looks like you are the only one running the linux CUDA version. CUDA is supposed to be backwards compatible, unless they recently changed that with the 5000 series cards. Any chance your Nvidia driver is outdated?
7) Message boards : News : New GPU OpenCL versions available (Message 3871)
Posted 4 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I meant both. For OpenCL/CUDA it is important that serialized parts are as efficient as possible. (At bare minimum it would allow one core to handle more GPUs or at least give some extra cycles to CPU version)
As for optimization, that was five years ago. Since then there were lots of major versions for GCC (about five). Good probability we can get some speed up even from compiler upgrade.

Two notes. I am working on out-of-band caching for OpenCL version using intercept library and looking at improvements CUDA might have mostly advantage in compilation/caching. And if I could get GetDecics to compile I'd like to make CUDA version for Windows too.

I'd be curious to see how you get a CUDA Windows app. I cross compile using mingw and at the time it was not possible to cross compile with CUDA, hence I went the route of OpenCL where the compiling is off loaded to the user's GPU at runtime.
8) Message boards : News : Thank you to Formula BOINC Challenge participants. (Message 3868)
Posted 2 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
Sorry, what was the challenge?
There were no posts here.

Formula BOINC:
https://www.formula-boinc.org/sprints.py?division=1&standing=team&race=3

I didn't post about it because it's a secret until it starts. I guess next time I can post after the start.
9) Message boards : News : Thank you to Formula BOINC Challenge participants. (Message 3865)
Posted 1 Jun 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I'd like to thank all the participants of the recent FB Sprint Challenge. As always, many good results were returned over the 3 day period, and are much appreciated!
10) Message boards : News : New GPU OpenCL versions available (Message 3861)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
Just little warning, I was looking at code and trying to get it compile and have it run correctly and so far I failed (using current GCC and MSYS2/Mingw64). If you get it to compile, could you please use GMP compiled with "--enable-fat", so all assembler optimizations are included it woudl be great. (Mingw64 already ships such version and it can be used as is) Even better if one could bump GMP and PARI to current versions (for PARI it is required for current GCC or compile fails).

Note: author of libGMP is bit crazy and vast majority of optimizations are in assembler and as such correct compilation is needed to get most of performance out of it.

Note 2: Currently in my compile GetDecics stops on nfinit0 which complains that used polynomial is not irreducible. Cause for this spurious error is so far unknown. (GP as published accepts it without any problems)


You must be referring to the CPU app. The current executables are built with O3 optimization and are about as efficient as possible for the gnu compiler. With that said, I was unaware of the enable-fat option with gmp. It would be interesting to see how much faster the code runs on various cpus with this option. Agreed that any new build should use the latest stable version of Pari (as well as boinc and gmp).
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Stats not syncing across other platforms - help (Message 3859)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
Also note that stats are exported once per day at 6:00 UTC.
12) Message boards : News : New GPU OpenCL versions available (Message 3854)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
So, will there be any updates to the nvidia linux apps? OpenCL perhaps? The CUDA drivers have also come a long was since cuda30 and some other projects are many versions further along.


I see no reason to update the openCL versions, since that's just code. But updating the CUDA versions might be helpful since those are built using the latest CUDA improvements which take advantage of the newer GPUs.


Just fyi, you don't have an OpenCL version for nvidia on Linux.

True. So my statement about updating the CUDA app only benefits the Nvidia Linux app.
13) Message boards : News : New GPU OpenCL versions available (Message 3852)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
So, will there be any updates to the nvidia linux apps? OpenCL perhaps? The CUDA drivers have also come a long was since cuda30 and some other projects are many versions further along.


I see no reason to update the openCL versions, since that's just code. But updating the CUDA versions might be helpful since those are built using the latest CUDA improvements which take advantage of the newer GPUs.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : FB Challenge (Message 3851)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I wonder if you were advised about the current FB Challenge.? I have been trying to get work for over an hour but no luck.


Yes, I was informed by Tim. All of my hosts have been communicating with the project just fine, so I think it's something specific with your account or hosts.

Does the event log in the BOINC manager give any hints?
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Stats not syncing across other platforms - help (Message 3850)
Posted 30 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
My email and CPID are same across all projects, but for some reason this one isn't being picked up by free-dc, BOINC or formula boinc. Looking for help anywhere I can get it. Thanks!

CPID : de56c5e26535d88db52357942db19d50


Did you consent to stats export?
16) Message boards : News : Spamming in the pm system (Message 3844)
Posted 12 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
It has been reported that spammers are now spamming users via the private messaging system. This may have been a one time thing, so I am keeping an eye on it. If anyone else has noticed this, please report via this thread or a pm to me, so I can deal with it. Thanks!
17) Message boards : Science : Should Job Replication be Enabled for this Project? (Message 3843)
Posted 12 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
I believe I mentioned this before, but let me start a new thread for discussion.

I noticed that NumberFields@home distributes a work unit (WU) to only one client and accepts the results computed by that client. However, the hardware and software stack used by volunteers may not be as reliable as an HPC or server grid. Many other projects, like Einstein@home, send one WU as two tasks to different clients (replication) and compare the results afterward to ensure reliability.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile for NumberFields@home to implement this, or if there is a way for the NumberFields@home server app to mathematically validate the client's results without replication.

I believe this was discussed years ago and is probably lost deep within some other thread, so I guess it doesn't hurt to revisit the issue. The bottom line is that replication would cause the searches to take twice as long to complete, and this is time we do not have. We could always run a 2nd pass at a later time if it was deemed necessary.

Also, when collating the data, my backend scripts detect anything suspicious and these cases are rerun offline. To this day I have never detected anything intentional, just the occasional bit error during upload (I assume). In addition, the algorithm has an inherent redundancy in that every field has many polynomial representatives and the algorithm gives them all (within the bounds). Note that every field is usually found 10 times over within a given search. There are also tests that can be performed on the final data sets that are analogous to parity tests. To summarize, if a few bad actors were modifying the results and managed to go undetected, then chances are it would still not make a difference in the final resuts.

I hope that explains the reasoning behind our decision to not use job replication.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Reduced credit per work unit (Message 3840)
Posted 2 May 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
Has anyone else noticed a drop in their RAC over the last 2 days?

As far as a i can tell, run times are unchanged, Credit per Task is unchanged, Estimated completion times are around the same, but the RAC on both of my systems has dropped by roughly 5,000 on one and 4,000 on the other (roughly the same percentage drop on both).
RAC was pretty much steady up to the 30/4, then since the 1/5 the drop.

I haven't looked at my RAC so I don't know if it's dropped. But there was a power outage on April 30th at the building housing the server and it took about 5 hours to restore. I keep about a days worth of tasks on my computers so I had plenty of work during the outage. If you only keep an hour or two of tasks then you may have run out of tasks and that would have affected your RAC.

I also noticed the ETA on the batch status page went up .2 days (~5 hours) - much of that was recovered when users eventually returned the backlog of results, but it didn't completely recover, possibly because some users were starved of tasks during the outage (but there could be other explanations).
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Android support? (Message 3835)
Posted 19 Apr 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
When will this project get Android support?


When I or someone else finds the time to port the code. This was attempted years ago and there were problems due to all the dependent libraries. Maybe the port would go smoother now.
20) Message boards : News : Web server upgrade tonight starting at 7pm MST (Message 3833)
Posted 19 Apr 2025 by Profile Eric Driver
Post:
The system update has been completed. Please let me know if you see any issues with the website or the server in general. Thanks!


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