charity engine

eddyc · 10 May 2012 at 10:24

Anyone heard of this?

http://www.charityengine.com

Looks like a good way to encourage people to get into distributed computing. Will anyone be taking part?

Can't see any sign of teams though. I think the prizes are the incentive rather than competition.

MartinBen439 · 10 May 2012 at 21:02

Well I've signed up one of my home rigs.

Its downloaded a load of MalariaControl work which it is crunching through now so we'll see how it goes.

derv · 10 May 2012 at 21:37

I saw this on BBC News this morning. There are clearly some businesses that would profit from having some powerful crunching potential at their fingertips, I wonder how commercial this is going to get.

MartinBen439 · 10 May 2012 at 21:47

Well the Malaria WU's said 75mins to complete actually only took 15 :cool:

Gonna try o/c that rig over weekend so be interesting to see how much faster it can crunch.

eddyc · 10 May 2012 at 21:47

Well I think I idea is to get it pretty commercial. But so long as the companies pay for the computing time and then that money is passed on to charity that is probably a good thing. Hard to know if it is a better thing than contributing to F@H or rosetta etc...

All better than nothing I suppose.

Interesting that they explicitly say on the site that they don't want dedicated crunchers. Only computers that would be turned on anyway... not totally sure about that approach either.

MartinBen439 · 10 May 2012 at 21:53

Well our work servers are on 24/7 and doing pretty much nothing from late evening till about 8am Mon-Fri so they could be used.

derv · 10 May 2012 at 22:00

eddyc said:
Interesting that they explicitly say on the site that they don't want dedicated crunchers. Only computers that would be turned on anyway... not totally sure about that approach either.

I suspect it's a "green" thing. Charities won't want to be attributed to people using excess electricity and helping global warming along... or complaining that their electricity bills have gone sky high

Pumpkinstew · 11 May 2012 at 11:40

eddyc said:
Hard to know if it is a better thing than contributing to F@H or rosetta etc...

They do state that when they have no work to do they will be sending out Einstein and Rosetta work. Whether you'll get credited for this (as BOINC credit or prize draw entries) I don't know.

It's a good idea, but I'd be more tempted to get involved if there was an app that sat under my existing BOINC rather than a customised BOINC app.
(I understand they want it to be simple as possible, but an alternative for us veterans would be nice.)

CaptainUnlikely · 11 May 2012 at 11:44

Pumpkinstew said:
It's a good idea, but I'd be more tempted to get involved if there was an app that sat under my existing BOINC rather than a customised BOINC app.
(I understand they want it to be simple as possible, but an alternative for us veterans would be nice.)

This. I read through the info on the site yesterday and it sounds interesting, but I'd be more inclined to do it if the prize draws were in addition to the points/friendly competition, because the latter is what motivates me more.

eddyc said:
Interesting that they explicitly say on the site that they don't want dedicated crunchers. Only computers that would be turned on anyway... not totally sure about that approach either.

As said above, it's most likely due to trying to come across as "green" but also, that was the original aim of distributed computing, to harness idle CPU time - as opposed to dedicating computers to it. Obviously with the introduction of points, teams, and rankings, the reality is somewhat different, which is all to the good at the end of the day.

dekez · 11 May 2012 at 12:53

To be honest I'm suprised no one has done something like this where it pays the donors. The amount of people who signed up for bitcoin which effectively wasted computer power, you could easily have a successful supercomputer for rent.

ToxicTBag · 11 May 2012 at 14:21

Thought i would give it a go, installed it signed up etc its held onto my seti account details but it wont do gpu tasks now doh!

Am guessing i would be better off uninstalling it as it seems all the gpu tasks must have been junked ..... any ideas?

MartinBen439 · 12 May 2012 at 19:56

I just added the Charity Engine to my existing Boinc manager and all seems to run fine - including Seti.

I am using Boinc 7.0.27

kolala · 13 May 2012 at 01:20

ToxicTBag said:
... but it wont do gpu tasks now doh!
... ..... any ideas?

I get a similar "non-existent GPU/CUDA device" message if multiple user sessions are run on this computer, think its caused by lack of GPU memory. Its only fixed by the traditional method of switching it not-on, then on again.

Maybe try yours with only one wu per GPU and see if that works.

hth

Biffa · 13 May 2012 at 02:04

does charity use gpus?

ToxicTBag · 14 May 2012 at 16:23

kolala said:
I get a similar "non-existent GPU/CUDA device" message if multiple user sessions are run on this computer, think its caused by lack of GPU memory. Its only fixed by the traditional method of switching it not-on, then on again.

Maybe try yours with only one wu per GPU and see if that works.

hth

Thanks for that sah tried it with the 1 task etc and it still junked stuff, think i best leave it for fear of seti nameing and shaming the stuff i have junked in the last few days

Biffa said:
does charity use gpus?

Doesn't seem so at present sah