Unexpected 50% RAC increase within days and problems with WU optimizations
Today I have noticed that my Mag in Amicable Numbers project went unexpectedly up by ~20% within a day or two. I was even more surprised about RAC – up by ~50%. I had to start digging up. Amicable Numbers project rewards 6,836.19 credits for each work unit (WU). On my GTX 1060 card it usually takes 1500s to 2000s to process one WU. I’ve never gave it much of a thought. When I checked today, some recent WU were processed in just ~500s, a few in under 200s! But they are still rewarded 6,836.19 credits. Did my card went on some kind of a turbo? Well, no. Processing times for those WU were much shorter. But why?
 | Amicable Numbers |
|---|
Let’s see what Sergei Chernykh, project admin says:
We've had a bunch of very GPU-friendly (highly parallelizable) work units recently, but as far as I can tell, we're back to regular work units again. All work units were calibrated to have approximately the same amount of computations for CPU version.
Run times on GPU are usually stable too, but sometimes they can vary a lot.
As we see, processing times are not easily controllable. There seems to be a problem, though – why they are calibrated for CPUs first, if project is GPU oriented?
Sergei is very helpful and I have received the following answer:
The speed increase for GPU over CPU depends on how well a WU can be parallelized, but it's hard to predict without actually running each WU. It's even different between various GPU models. CPUs are more stable because they don't run that many parallel threads. That's why WUs were normalized for CPUs.
Running each WU for calibration only doesn’t make sense, and it seems that perfect solution doesn’t exist. It doesn’t pose much of a problem, though. Everybody has the same chances and scores equalize over time.
If you have noticed, my Mag grew up less than RAC, but it did, anyway. I think this is due to inactive users. If someone didn’t crunch the project when shorter WU were available, his RAC didn’t receive a boost and his magnitude dived a bit.
| Gridcoin Research |  |
|---|
There's also the time taken for workunits to get validated, I crunch LHC@home atm and I have over 450 WUs waiting to be validated still. That's a lot of points I'm waiting on.
You know , just because a project has a GPU application that its not just a GPU based project , I ran AM under both CPU/GPU for the better part of it being whitelisted to a few months ago and mostly on my 16 core xeon blades/amd 9590 and gtx750ti. Hell you should feel lucky that AM being such a new project has a GPU application as there is extreme competition for RAC/MAG etc with the whitelist being so limited and projects getting voted off due to they are processing what was crunched before releasing new batches of work units. I wish DrugDiscovery@home would bring back their GPU application and many other projects should follow suit since a typical GPU application has 5 times the actual data to process vs CPU work units. We need to get the community reaching out ( yes you don't get a gridcoin.us email address you get to look all pro with gmail or yahoo or your own domain representing Gridcoin ) and getting more projects white listed ( along with implementing my gray list idea ) new projects pop up constantly. Now if we can just shut that little bitch __ dutch __ up since his nose is obviously up someones ass and get our " trusted community " bullshit leadershit fixed and or replaced so that Gridcoin is honorable and we need to actually have ethics and follow them vs whine a whale gets their own way. We also need more Android capable applications since thats also a saturated area and hard to earn your piece of pie seeing as there is math done ##hosts x ##hosts hardware / users etc and everyone has a phone so most crunch on them too. You know you have as much weight as anybody else in the community , same as me , same as anyone on freenode / slack / steemit etc.