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...i am thinking of specifying the seeds as 1 - 25 or so. It should take about 7 or 8 hours I think. I´m not sure if this is even reasonable. From what I understand, the effect that a specified seed has is completely random, so specifying more seeds should give me a better chance of getting a better result? Should I specify as many seeds as possible for the time I have, or once a certain number of seeds is used, does the result not improve significantly?
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You never know when 1 more seed will give you a better result, so sometimes I'll run a huge number of seeds. However, it's very unlikely that more than 10 would be useful. That's the number I often use. Some Altera people will say that more like 5 seeds is plenty, but I often see the best result happen after more than 5 seeds. The variation really is random, but the amount of variation depends on the design. If your design tends to have only a small variation from seed to seed, you might find that a small number of seeds is enough to have a good chance of getting a result that is about as good as any seed would give with an infinite number of seeds.
DSE has (or at least used to have) a setting that would make it stop automatically when you get a good result. I've never used that setting. I monitor the dse\results.csv file (updated as the DSE seed sweep runs for most Quartus versions) while the seed sweep is running to see whether I have the results I want before the seed sweep is finished. Then I manually stop DSE early if I don't need any more seeds to compile. (I never open the .dse.rpt or results.csv directly while DSE is running. I make a copy and open the copy. I think I've had DSE have a problem when I had one of these files open while DSE tried to update it.)
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There would be no programming files for which you have to choose the right seed and recompile as usual back in quartus.
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There is a DSE setting to archive the results of all compilations. I think something changed between Quartus versions for whether the Assembler will run, but you will probably have programming files in the DSE output .qar files if you have the Assembler enabled in your project settings. If DSE in your Quartus version skips the Assembler, then you could still use the DSE output .qar file to run the Assembler without recompiling.
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