Competition Idea's ?

[magman]

As I mentioned in another thread, I will be retiring a few of my older crunchers as new blood enters the farm. These aren't bad crunchers really, I just want to get a bit more processing from my already high electricity bill.

As these crunchers don't have a major secondhand value, I thought it worth livenening up the forums a bit by running some competitions, but to be honest I haven't got any idea's that really excite me at the moment. So I thought I would throw this issue over to the forum to see if anyone can suggest any reasonable competition idea's?

Some idea's I can throw into the pot for starters are:

Some obvious rules, such as entrants being members of the forums

Entrants should be members of one of our DC teams would seem to be sensible.

We could offer one of the prizes to encourage some recruitment of new members.



So come on, get your thinking caps on and lets get some different discussions going on in the forum.

 

[magman]

I don't pay for my leccy - I'll have 'em

As far as competitions go, I'm not sure. I would imagine any sort of race would be dominated by the core 2 duo owners now - perhaps we could have a race with different categories (Core 2 Duo, A64 X2, A64, Athlon XP, Intel P4, P3, Dual Xeon etc. with smaller prizes for the winners depending on what is available).

I'll have a think.

Stan

I agree with you that races are now getting a lot more complicated, so may not be the best model to work towards.

I think the more successful competitions we've had in the past were based around a target prediction (like how many coins are in the bottle). Something like when will the team or a user reach a particular milestone (though you may have an issue with people holding off production to possibly influence the result in their favour with a team based milestone).

Perhaps we could come up with a points based system, like a league table. Points would be scored for how close to a particlar target the members guess was (with F1 type scoring for the best guess), how many borgs, valid parps and stomps in a period (stomps would only be valid if a parp was issued in advance and the parpee was active). Done over a week or longer, it would certainly liven up the conference for a bit.

Time to lob the ball back over the net methinks.

 

[magman]

Perhaps I should make clear what the potential prizes are.

As a minimum, there will be 2 barebones Athlon XP systems that are pretty much the equivalent of a Stompmonster layer (XP1600, Heatsink, 128Meg Memory, PSU and small hard disk). Ironically, the two systems are almost exactly what I won in a competition from JayDee a while ago when he was upgrading/downsizing his farm (I can't remember which). I promised when I won them to offer them back to the team when I was done with them.

I might even succumb to the temptation to throw a third system into the prize pot, depending on how my upgrades progress and what competition idea's come up.

We don't have to limit the comps to Folding as well, we could add a comp for a BOINC project or two as well.

 

[magman]

Sorry in advance for a slightly off topic post however i was wondering Magman what was up with Stompmonster's produciton of late, SETI@work has it down as inactive!!!! Also was thinking if no one is interested in those systems could they be added to the stopmonster? with all this desertion of SETI which has happened recently, it could do with all the help it can get.

To be honest, I've been having some power problems with the Stompmonster and the rest of my farm lately. When the only thing using power in my garage is my computers and they keep tripping a 16A circuit breaker, there are some problems in there. So at present, the Stompmonster as well as 4 of my other crunchers are powered down at the moment.

Part of the stompmonster will be back up and crunching in a few days time, I am planning to replace the breaker for the garage this weekend. I will just have to see what the loading is when I start powering everything up again. I may also have one or two of the PSU's misbehaving (probably with age), which is an interesting lottery when you have 14 PSU's to choose from.

This power issue is also one of the reasons for my recent set of processor upgrades, as well as the release of some crunchers that will effectively become the competition prizes. All told, I should be able to reduce my power consumption by at least 4 computers and actually be producing more results.

 

[magman]

All of the PSU's appear to be working OK, I suspect the problem may be more on the mains side, such as the main 200V capacitors being on their way out, or a transformer winding causing problems. It is actually tripping out the RCD, which is nothing to do with the DC side, that a PSU tester would affect. The only thing a PSU tester would gain me is a constant load, and I can simulate this with a loaded motherboard and hard drive.

I think I should be able to isolate the faulty unit or units this weekend (I've already got my suspicions about one or two of them). The main hastle though is that it is tripping the RCD, which switches all of my computers O**, which then leads to a not insignificant exercise to switch them all on again (though I'm sure Lemonman would appreciate me taking a long time to complete my tests).