DC Vault Shake up - OcUK members input needed.

hanluc · 16 May 2014 at 07:07

In an attempt to get some life back into the DC Vault competition, Rusty, who runs the DC Vault is proposing a shake up of the vault. He has asked that various representatives of the Vault teams consult their members with regards to adding/removing projects from the competition and recategorising them if needed.

Please post here if you have any thoughts on what projects you would like to see added, removed or moved within the vault to another category.

The project must:
be active
accept new members and teams immediately upon registration
have parsable team stats
have team stats that are updated regularly
provide a client program which runs on a local PC

The project must not:
be a keylogger or mouseclick counter
have a maximum number of teams or members or exclude any country

From discussions so far it seems that likely candidates for removal are RNAWorld due to its lack of work and PSP due to it falling to accept new members and teams immediately upon registration because of the manual registration it uses.

diogenese · 16 May 2014 at 08:04

Psp going would loose us a heap of points but ive tried for ages to get work and can't so I suppose it should go.
I know nothing about rna world.

hanluc · 16 May 2014 at 08:46

Yeah, I've put some time and effort into it, Phil more so, it would knock us of out of the top 10, but we have to look at what is best for vault not only ourselves. It's not a very popular project, some guys from [H] requested over 10 days ago to be added to the server and still no reply, this is unacceptable in my opinion and looking further back a guy from SETI.Germany requested to have his team created and never received any reply, we are neck and neck with them, if they just drop a few WUs in PSP they would be 1000s ahead of us. It is also covered by Primegrid as one of its sub projects.

Some guys are also talking about having a Boinc only vault or at least the vast majority being Boinc, which would kill it for me, I made the point their would a a whole bunch of big teams in the top 10 who would be there just as a matter of circumstance and may not be interested in the vault.

One argument is that muon1 & ogr-28 (not added yet) are covered yoyo@home and PSP & SoB are covered by Primegrid.

diogenese · 16 May 2014 at 18:31

I've been crunching muon1 from way before yoyo@home started and I have no reason to change.
I thought that was the whole point of the vault to combine boinc and non boinc projects in an even way, what's the point if it's just boinc with standardised cobblestones?

PhilthyPhil · 19 May 2014 at 21:00

RNAworld - it should be removed as per the vault rules due to no work
PSP - it should probably be removed because of the unreliable registration system (although I had no problems). It will be unfortunate for us due to the points we will lose, but it should probably never have been in the vault in the first place.
I would not support removing smaller projects which have been incorporated into larger (normally boinc) projects as I feel this may discourage people from supporting small/new projects.
I don't like the idea of a boinc only vault. If anything I would rather the vault was kept for non-boinc projects, boinc stats is what I go by for boinc projects.

hanluc · 20 May 2014 at 08:25

Current suggestions for removal from [H] and agreed with by evga are:

ABC
RNA
LHC
The Lattice Project
Climate Prediction

.. for lack of continuous work

Docking
eOn

.. because they are closing/closed

PSP

.. registration time.

Current suggestions for addition are:

Constellation - Physical Sciences
Ibercivis (they gave permission via PM) - Miscellaneous since it is an umbrella project
PrimaBoinca - Mathematics
DistrRTgen - Miscellaneous
Numberfields (they gave permission via PM) - they also said they have multiple years worth of work left to do. - Mathematics
Distributed Data Mining - users should take note that it requires Java to be installed - This would most likely fit in Miscellaneous.

I've been trying some of the projects so far,
Numberfields: seems ok apart from the boinc progress bar starting at 50% and finishing around 64%, but that's nothing to be too concerned about.

Constellation: currently running smoothly
Ibercivis: No work sent, none sent for the past 9 days according to the stats, I'll bring that up.

The rest I haven't tried but according to the stats they seem to be running ok.

WUprop and Mindmodeling have also been mentioned with reservations brought up about them.

If anyone has any thoughts on the above please say.

EDIT: Forgot to say, I going to request that OGR-28 be added now that 27 has finished unless anyone has any objections.

Coleslaw · 20 May 2014 at 20:08

ibercivis had a problem with their server. They were using a different server for people to upload their finished work. I do not have any other details on it. Typically they have an ongoing supply of Wilson work units. The server issue was just recently.

Coleslaw · 20 May 2014 at 20:10

Climate Prediction wasn't due to lack of work but rather the fact that their stats export has been messed up for months. Therefore, nobody is progressing in those Vault points because of it. They have had quite a few issues over the last year too.

Pilgrim57 · 23 May 2014 at 10:55

Coleslaw said:
Climate Prediction wasn't due to lack of work but rather the fact that their stats export has been messed up for months. Therefore, nobody is progressing in those Vault points because of it. They have had quite a few issues over the last year too.

A BOINC update caused WU to keep crashing or not d/l and so couldn't get new WU that would run as you'd reached the daily limit for d/ls. But new work has been slack at times.

Coleslaw · 23 May 2014 at 17:41

Yeah...that has been a more recent issue and not a long term thing. However, on top of the DC-Vault rule violation in regards to stats exports, I also disagree with how they do their points system. If say I was to leave my team and come here, my points would to. That would be an almost 1million point gain for your team and loss for mine at CPDN. None of the other BOINC projects do this. If you earn points while on a team, those points stay with that team. Not so with CPDN.

hanluc · 18 Jun 2014 at 06:55

The proposed additions & removals and the reasons behind this are now in the open forum of the vault, feel free to voice your opinion there if you have one.

Projects to be removed:

ABC
RNA
LHC
The Lattice Project
PSP
Climate prediction

Projects to be added:

Constellation - Physical Sciences
PrimaBoinca – Mathematics
Numberfields – Mathematics
OGR-28 – Maths
NRG@Home - Bio
MindModeling – Bio

We are ranked very low on some of these new additions, and quite high on some of the removals so we will slump down in the rankings, but all the more fun climbing back up hopefully.

diogenese · 18 Jun 2014 at 08:57

there is always more stompage available from the bottom

hanluc · 18 Jun 2014 at 12:46

I've done some calculations of what vault points we'd get if these projects where added to the vault tomorrow, maximum possible would be 10,000 pts obviously.

Constellation OcUK position 71 out of 617 teams = 8,866 pts
Mindmodeling OcUK position 83 out of 863 teams = 8,782 pts
Numberfields OcUK position 172 out of 617 teams = 5,262 pts
Primaboinca OcUK position 248 out of 348 teams = 4,498 pts
NGR OcUK position 155 out of 199 teams = 2,262 pts
OGR-28 OcUK position 269 out of 280 teams = 393 pts

So certainly some room for improvement

MGP · 19 Jun 2014 at 09:21

I've said my piece elsewhere that removing LHC would be a poor move and against the spirit of the Boinc platform which is designed to take up the slack by using other projects if one is unavailable. Work may be patchy but I far prefer an idea that the project looks at it's results and decides where it needs to go next rather than churning out irrelevant stuff. Many of our team have done LHC work in the last month and week, so there is stuff about. Indeed I am currently crunching LHC stuff as I type this. No point in me saying it over on vault if you fed that back.

I suppose the real point here is that vault encourages people to participate in some of the odder and minor projects out there if their team is big enough to do well in the vault. If vault is to encourage such diversity, and vault is itself to be relevant, it should include smaller projects like LHC.

Coleslaw · 19 Jun 2014 at 22:17

MGP, I can assure you we decided on LHC@home (Six Track) to be removed not because this weeks work was unacceptable but because they have had consistent history of little to no work. We do appreciate the idea of supporting small projects, however LHC is far from small. They have two working projects and are setting up a third when they should really just consider one project and create various sub projects. However, they aren't the first project to do this. I too have ran the project for years. I can assure you that I will continue to support it even outside of the DC-Vault. Where you logic goes wrong is in the projects need for contributors. They can't/don't keep the masses fed as it is. They don't need more resources to come. When they can feed the masses, they will be considered for being added again. You must keep in mind that the DC-Vault is first and foremost a competition for bragging rights. The front page is very clear on the purpose of the DC-Vault. Bringing resources to lesser known projects is merely a side benefit and not a sole focus of the DC-Vault.

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