Soldato
- Joined
- 19 Jan 2005
- Posts
- 2,729
- Location
- Oxford/Bristol
Beyond B0rkley....The Wider World of BOINC
It’s been a while since Issue 2 but it will be even longer until Issue 4. I’m off travelling in May (Inca Trail and Galapagos Islands
) and probably won’t have much chance to pick things up when I get back again. Unfortunately that will mean two machines in the dreaded o** setting but I’m on a mission to reach 100,000 total and OcUK top 200 before I leave on May 6th. It'll be close.....
Credit Comparison Chart
The credit chasers amongst you will be very happy to hear this.
A stats site has done a useful comparison of BOINC projects to show which give the most credit out per flop.Table here.
Before you switch everything to Einstein though, read below.
Einstein@Home
Einstein@Home has recently completed the intermediate S5RI search and has now commenced S5R2 proper. The new app takes a novel heuristic approach to the problem of interrogating large amounts of data.
Considering the new app from a crunching rather than a science perspective there are also big changes from S5RI. All of them bad
Firstly the WU’s run for much longer. Between 5 and 12 times longer than the S5RI WU’s.
The second problem is a direct result of the runtime. Previously several WU’s could be run from the same group of downloaded data files before the scheduler had received all the work required for that set and issued a delete command and a new set. This was great for dial-up/limited bandwidth users as it reduced the number of large files that got sent out. The new approach sees fewer larger WU’s generated form each file set, meaning more big files to download.
Thirdly the granted credit has been ‘fixed’. The credit comparison chart from the link above shows that E@H was issuing ~30% more credit than the other BOINC projects which are largely in line with each other. This was largely down to better optimisation in the old app.
This has been rectified although more WU’s will need to be returned to see if the team have overcompensated and are now handing out below average credit.
Lastly the compiler hasn’t done a great job and anyone running a combination of Windows and an AMD chip will find that their work takes about 125% of the time it would take on a comparable Linux or Intel machine.
As you can imagine there is plenty of vocal satisfaction on the E@H boards right now with some calls for the new app to be recalled and given beta status until the compiled code has been fixed and the credit awards fully verified. Although with the S5RI work all done how much harder would they complain if the project had the dreaded ‘no available work’ message displayed?
Plenty more information (and lots of complaints) can be found in this thread.
Seti@Home
Sometime in the near future the transition will be made to crunching work from the new multibeam recorder. A warning has been posted that work may be unavailable for short periods in the near future.
The Arecibo radio observatory will be closed for the next three months for maintenance work so data collection will be off during this. The team have said they will be devoting more resources to Astropulse development in this time.
Boincstats and Primegrid
The admins over at Boincstats/BAM/primegrid finally lost patience with the slow pace of the fundraising and took out a loan to buy a new server. Expect various bits to be down over the next week or so while the data is moved around and tested.
In fairness Boincstats and BAM is a very useful site for all things BOINC related and if you have a few quid spare you should consider a donation.
Spinhenge@Home
Spinhenge has a new screensaver. Screenies.
Team Progress from 23/03/07 to 25/04/07
SIMAP AND QMC are missing from the graphic because the team name is slightly different. If Chrislip, who founded those teams, could synch them up our overall total will get a nice little boost. If anyone spots any others that are missing shout below.
Any and all comments, suggestions and feedback are eagerly received, so remember to hit reply and add to any discussion below.
Happy crunching everyone.
Honwards and Hupwards,
Stew
Most recent version of BOINC Client is 5.8.16. for Windows and Linux. 5.8.17 for Mac
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Archive
Issue 1 Issue 2
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Ah well I'm sure it'll all work itself out in the end.
