Is crunching a dying art ?

Two days and not a post in here.

Either theres too many forums or we are just not as enthusiastic as we once were.

Which ever way its not a great advert to lure new team members in with.

Time for a tidy up of sub-forums ?

Not as many crunching topics to discuss when all is running well. Perhaps we should ask Berkeley to crash again…

I’m still crunching but some of the office machines have died on me since I’ve been on site since February.

Good news - I’m back in the office early August so they’re getting sorted out :slight_smile:

Better news - Just bought a Dual dual core Opteron, (guess that counts as a quad) and a dual Xeon. Will have them on on remote access so they don’t get bored overnight :smiley:

Nice! :thumbsup:

You guessed my words,
exactly thats why i had withdrawn my accounts from the team.
It was getting that much quiet in here i thought the team is breaking apart.

No interessting posts, nothing were i can catch a laugh (e.g. Neals posts) after a stressful day at work just the ordinary spam which sound sfamiliar with what i get every day with the emails.

I might consider bringing back the accounts later on but at the moment I will take a look for other teams as well

tbh, my crunchers just sit there doing what they do in trying to keep TPR folders in the top100 whilst helping out a most worthwhile cause. Ever since moving to Folding, they’ve required hardly any babysitting at all. They just work.

Noted the comments on the sub forums - will chat over a beer/irc the Mojos weekend ??

DT.

There are too many forums, but crunching certainly is not a “dying art” here, 24 machines BOINC, 9 D2OL. If that’s dying it sure looks healthy to me :slight_smile:

The act of crunching isn’t a dying art, but the setting up of a pc to to crunch is. All we can o know is just download and set it running, but in the days of old when seti first started we had options of , Cli, seti driver, seti que, more controll over dumping and only the one project to crunch. The newer vesions of the projects have dumbed all this down, diffrent scoring system, no configuration etc.

You guessed my words,
exactly thats why i had withdrawn my accounts from the team.
It was getting that much quiet in here i thought the team is breaking apart.

No interessting posts, nothing were i can catch a laugh (e.g. Neals posts) after a stressful day at work just the ordinary spam which sound sfamiliar with what i get every day with the emails.

I might consider bringing back the accounts later on but at the moment I will take a look for other teams as well

If the forums are quiet, I can’t see how that means the team is breakign apart? If you want to make the forums more lively, don’t wait for other people to post, start threads or join in other threads your self, we can’t count on a single person to post genitalia threatened topics, as was said before in another thread, we are a team and to liven the place up will requiere a team effort.

Neal said he would leave and removed his folding input, but he can still be seen actively around the forums :slight_smile:

p.s. crunching maybe the main reason people join these here forums, but we are more thn that, there is a thriving browser based gaming community in the way of Ogame.

From my own perspective I’ve big issues in real life that have stopped me from posting, but I try to view at least once a day to keep up on news.

Other than that there are people who are off taking exams, going off on holiday, which can all make it seem a bit quiet. It’s just one of those things and no reason to jump ship. As Preecey says, we are more than just a crunching community and just cause some peeps aint posting, don’t mean they aren’t around.

We came here for SETI, we stay here for TPR!! :thumbsup:

I think Preecey hit the mark quite well … download, instal, register, press go :shrug:

I just do D2OL now (when i remember to start it :rolleyes: )

The games forum does appear to be the most active at the moment, and is at least keeping the forums alive (maybe the wrong way to word it, but you know what I mean).

It’s been a while since I visited the other forums ( doggies, digi, etc) are they going through a similar stage also ?

Maybe a tidy up and prune would be in order … but where to start and the impact it will have :confused:

Boinc is killing it

1.) the ammount of time it takes to get credit
2.) spends more time down than up

This combined with us not having out own set of stats pages like we did for classic, is in my opinion whats killing the fun. Drag races are impossible as even though in fairness all parties would be battling the validator rather than each other.
I made a start on stats pages but just too busy to actually get it finished, and by now I bet the xml format has changed 40 times anyway, and if it does stay constant how many times does the xml fail to update …

Balrog was right many moons ago :moon: I think. The thing we are missing is the stats, and the races.

DT.

I’ll see if I can get some Predictor stats for you, but SETI BOINC takes more time than I have currently. Anyone else wanna take on SETI, I don’t have a problem with that.

BOINC killed it for me.
When I was away last week I fired up an ancient laptop which still had SetiHide installed, so of course I knocked off a few Classic WU’s. For some reason that seemed fun. I got very sick of Boinc, the final killer being when I couldn’t get it to work from behind the poxy server at work.
Now I stick to Folding, which is dead easy.
Dunno what has happened to the forums, but they do seem v quiet these days.

Seti Classic was, relatively, an uncontrolled free-for-all. You get an instant response because they don’t check the result upon reception. You always have work because they send you something to keep you happy even if it is a complete waste of time.

Seti Boinc is suffering because they have more users than they need to satisfy their current ability to produce work and check it in real time. Even though Seti is my ‘First Love’ in this area, as long as that is the case I am happy to do other things. At the moment I can convince myself that I am helping to design the Large Hadron Collider and to commission the first perhaps-realistic gravity wave detectors. Soon I will be helping defend us from unfriendly asteroids. I am happy.

Boinc is making all this possible - I would not be prepared to have several different projects running simultaneously if they all had their own private little world fighting for 100% of my backround processing.

Well its good to see theres still comittment to distributed computing and theres some glimmer of inter-team rivalry going on.

One snippet of information I have picked up quite recently is the credit for Seti-Classic units appears to have been frozen in March. Any classic units done since then will vanish once the project stops. I was hoping to stop at 60k but there seems little point now continuing classic.

So back to inter-team rivalry, I dont have a lot of hardware these days. Running remsh to launch seti on 150+ sparc workstations of an evening isnt an option these days. However there was some mention of 13 days to getting stomped at D2OL what ever that is.

I could swap 50 classic/day to D2OL but if theres a validator to fight with I’ll need some convincing thats its going to be worthwhile.

. . . . . ?

@tfw: take a look at the sticky in the biological sciences forum for D²Ol info, we are currently going for a top 10 place and trying to hold of the stomp from the DD boys (about a month), results are uploaded by the client software every 6 hrs and you are credited similar to how LM was.

@walrom: why not put the D²OL shortcut icon in you startup folder, that way it will always start when windows does.

Curly

Seti classic was my daily thing since I started it ?? I cant really remeber. I have had two attempts at boinc both failures.

I understand BOINC is the main program to other projects. Its the rest I cant understand, how the scoring works, where are the results and like someone has mentioned above I cant see our stats.

What I Liked about Seti Classic:

Simple to set up. CLI or screensaver
Easy to monitor progress
Nice cacheing proggy Seti Driver / Seti Q
Instant results ie upload bam they are on your account
Nice team stats

BOINC What I like

Options of different Projects

I have just started doing some D2OL, and I have posted on that forum that I really like this project, its got the qaulities of seti classic, client is more functional ie you can cache and upload and within a bit results are nearly instant. I really like this project its refuelled my interest in DC projects again.

I just dont find this BOINC the same as classic, it doesnt give me the same enjoyment level as classic. As others have stated its more automated and once set up away it goes.

The Boinc projects present simple lists of “Top users” and “Top teams” and provide the famous xml files for more detailed statistical analysis. There are several sites which provide quite superb detailed information and graphs, for example the sites I use:

Boincstats: users (me), teams (us). Lots of other buttons to click and names to search for on this site…

Toby Murray’s stats (courtesy of our friends The Knights who say Ni!)

Anything we do should (and does when it happens…) complement these sources with divisions, virtual teams, drag races and so on.

Thats the missing link, in the old days I could visit the our teams stats and see where / who we were nearest too on our own team stats page.

There used to be races and all could instantly see where they stood.

Its all got a bit harder to do that now, and as such its taken away a bit of fun, well for me it has anyway.