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It was mentioned on PG that CW-cieve has only NVidia support. Will it be so in the future? Better to already know it. |
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Reggie Volunteer moderator
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Chances are strong that we'll use a new app that is not Nvidia specific. Not set in stone at this point, as it requires a lot of effort from a few people to get CW-Sieve up again. |
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Thanks!
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Is a forthcoming CW-Sieve subproject a thing or just speculation? This is my first hearing of it. I for one welcome it! |
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ReggieVolunteer moderator
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Is a forthcoming CW-Sieve subproject a thing or just speculation? This is my first hearing of it. I for one welcome it!
It will come eventually. We don't have any sort of ETA, but it's on the timescale of months or maybe even years. It comes down to when admins and/or developers have time. I got WW up over the course of a few months when I was unemployed with lots of free time. That's no longer the case. |
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rogueVolunteer developer
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I assume that you referring to a sieve that only supports base 2 Cullens and Woodalls. Outside of adding support for other GPUs, what other improvements do you envision? |
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ReggieVolunteer moderator
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Note that about all of this is from memory and could be wrong, but here's what I remember:
When we ran CW-Sieve before, it only supported CPU and Nvidia GPUs. We would really like the to restart the subproject with support for AMD GPUs as well. Of course, speed improvements are always nice as well. I believe it's been close to a decade since that software was written so I imagine new CPU and GPU features could provide considerable speedup if the software supports it.
IIRC MTsieve was able to outperform one of the old programs but not the other. If we do use MTsieve (which I think is likely unless the old app outperforms it), we'll also need to do more testing and write/adapt a boinc wrapper to go with it. This is in addition to admins going through the old server side code, as well as doing some initial sieving to prevent initial uploads from being huge. |
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 Dave
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Sounds like a plan to me. |
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rogueVolunteer developer
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Note that about all of this is from memory and could be wrong, but here's what I remember:
When we ran CW-Sieve before, it only supported CPU and Nvidia GPUs. We would really like the to restart the subproject with support for AMD GPUs as well. Of course, speed improvements are always nice as well. I believe it's been close to a decade since that software was written so I imagine new CPU and GPU features could provide considerable speedup if the software supports it.
IIRC MTsieve was able to outperform one of the old programs but not the other. If we do use MTsieve (which I think is likely unless the old app outperforms it), we'll also need to do more testing and write/adapt a boinc wrapper to go with it. This is in addition to admins going through the old server side code, as well as doing some initial sieving to prevent initial uploads from being huge.
For base 2, the NVIDIA sieve is faster, but that sieve does not support other bases. It would be nice if improvements were made directly to the gcwsieve/gcwsievecl programs built from mtsieve, but mtsieve has some overhead as it is a generic framework. Someone wanting to write a new base 2 sieve for Cullen/Woodall will probably avoid the framework because they view it as a burden to writing the fastest possible code. I focus on writing code that is portable, readable, and easy for the average developer to understand and modify. Others I have worked with do not have that focus. |
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Michael GoetzVolunteer moderator
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For base 2, the NVIDIA sieve is faster, but that sieve does not support other bases.
To be clear, there's no need for additional *G*CW sieving at this point (or anywhere in the near future.) The interest is only for base 2 sieving.
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Only for future. It is unlikely to restart even in 2 years but very good to know right now.
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