BOINC

Here's a great stat of the day - what happens when your 8 thread i7 picks up a full load of WUs for a project you've only ran once before. From my WUProp stat page:

Project:
PrimeGrid

Application:
Genefer

Running Time (hours):
13.08

Pending (hours):
1,218.50

And since all 8 tasks are between 75 and 83%, that pending number has a LOT of room to still grow!
 
Yeah...the Genefer work units are monsters. They pay out well too. PrimeGrid rewards users now for running the longer work units with bonus points to make them worth the risk. The Genefer (world record) work units on GPU's are pretty huge too. Nothing like getting a half million points off of one work unit. totally throws your RAC off. LOL
 
WUProp work units have had their durations increased to 6 hours to help with the Validator. This could be good and bad. Bad when you get a failed work unit. Good for the project. I don't know if the file sizes will be the same or not, so it could be either way if you are on a tiered internet service.

http://wuprop.boinc-af.org/forum_thread.php?id=243#1951
 
Glad to have you in the ranks. Let us know if you have any questions. :)
 
Not bad at all. You should tear through the team ranks rather quick with that RAC at WCG
 
Welcome to the commandos!!! Glad to have anybody crunching with us minority here.
 
ChelseaOilman said:
Yea, I've finally had enough of the PG vs. Donor drama. I'm done with F@H.
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Been there done that. Stopped running FAH several years ago to focus on WCG. Got tired of the client software issues, constant server outages and required hardware upgrades just to keep pace.

Glad to have you with us. Welcome!!!
 
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Gilthanis said:
Honestly, I am not aware of any, but I will keep my eyes open for any.

I think currently your only options for that field are the protein based sciences in hopes that they lead to break throughs down the road...
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Thanks. I guess Simap, Docking and Poem it is still for now.

And this pogs thing. Not even sure what it is, but I've done nothing in it and that must change. :D
 
alan2308 are you just looking for projects in the DC-Vault or any BOINC projects in general?

Rosetta is another protein (technically) project and is part of the Vault
Ralph which is the Alpha project for Rosetta (doesn't have work very often)
CAS has a protein app (I think)
Volpex has a protein app but it works different than other BOINC projects
najmanovich Research (or NRG) I believe has protein research.
I may have missed one or more, but those are a few more to look into.
 
A project that's in the vault would be great, but if it's research is in an area that interests me I'll go all in. For example, I've done a ton of DistRTGen work over the years even though politics have kept it out of the vault all this time.

What we need is for someone without a life to come along and resurrect the big list of projects. We tried, it's just too much work. :D
 
Pogs is an optical survey where they take optical, infrared, UV, and other telescope info and put it together to make a sweet picture of galaxies nearby. They also use the data they collect to take measurements of celestial bodies in those galaxies. The cool thing is that you can see the specific images you're processing, and can pretty much quite literally see your results when and while you compute. Neat stuff!!!
 
Forgot! Rosetta isn't specifically researching MS, however indirectly their increased understanding of proteins and such (less political than FAH) should still help others with that research. Apparently the UW Institute for Protein Design uses the data from Rosetta to better make synthetic proteins, potentially helping created better more targeted vaccines in the future!
 
For those that haven't added the line in their cc_config file that tells BOINC to report finished tasks immediately, The newest test build 7.2.36 changed its report deadline from once every 24 hours to once every hour. This is good for users but increase server load (theoretically) project side.
 
I have started a BOINC Client running WCG on my old Pentium E2140, in order to know better the software, projects and stats system.

Who knows, I may need this knowledge in a near future for my currently folding rigs !
 
Glad to have you on board. There are some pretty good subprojects at WCG and they have a pretty active forum with responses from the WCG staff. The only downsides are:

They use a different login name than how the rest of the BOINC projects do things.
They have a pretty low point pay out compared to the rest of the BOINC world. (Only matters if you are competing BOINC-wide.)
They don't currently have any GPU apps.
They are very slow in doing much of anything that improves user relations. AKA badge improvements, website preferences/functionality, announcing new sub project launches in advance, etc...
Forum searches for information is terrible. Rarely does a search bring up valid results and information is scattered quite a bit between forum posts. Basically, you have to read about every thread to keep up. It gets exhausting. :)
 
So a belated welcome to Chelsea, and any other wayward Folders we have coming over, both temporary and for the long haul. I think you'll find we have plenty of fun over here on our monthly pushes, and be sure to go check out our other thread on the DC Vault. After all, why just settle for being #1 in the world in F@H, when we can be #1 in the world on a list of a random collection of regularly changing science projects? :D
 
Hey guys, along with a few others, getting a bit tired of the f@h drama! Is there anywhere I can have a chat about this wcg and boinc stuff? Still trying to get my head around it, I tried some boinc client a while ago and nearly broke my brain trying to understand it :p.

Quick question though, does this stuff scale well on cpu's with lots of cores?
 
Absolutely, I'm not in the IRC channels right now due to how busy the new baby keeps me and the rest of life, but I do check the forums a ton. Either drop some questions here, shoot me a PM, or have a look at the DC Guides.

And yes, multiple cores do quite well with BOINC projects. MOST of them are only single threaded, so you would run multiple work units on a single system. There are a few projects that have multi threaded apps but aren't as popular. I would start with the BOINC install how to and go from there. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1768558
One of the big things to remember is, out of the 80+ BOINC projects out there, 7 of them we use a slightly different team name which is mentioned in the BOINC install guide thread.

I also posted this not too long ago about points and scoring since there were a lot of misinformation going around about BOINC points and how they compare. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1798688

I also want to encourage all new people to BOINC to read the first post in this thread. Lots of good information and may actually answer a few questions while maybe generating a few more. We would be happy to help all who have questions.
 
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New project - http://chess.qugate.org/

"The purpose of this project is to construct a chess winnig possition classifier (or score estimator) based on some simple features (e.g. the number of pieces of each kind, number of squares controled by given side, numbers of checks that you can give in a possition and so on) The first goal of the project is to establish how far we can get with relatively cheap methods of position evaluation and simple data mining methods (eg. logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, SVM, decision trees). The second goal is to use more advance machine learning techniques for recognition of winning position to emulate human behaviour of various levels of chess proficiency. This means we need good heuristic which will allow to narrow the range of positions to calculate in depth. There is a hope that modifying this heuristic from “more learnt” to “less learnt” we will obtain something similar to natural human levels."
 
I will be donating an Optiplex GX270 to another needy home this week. So that is one more borged core and one less PC getting scrapped. :)
 
Plagiarism seems to be having work right now. Get them while you can. :) (warning...many of them still fail)
 
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Jathanis, you didn't miss much...very few of mine actually ran and validated. Most just errored out like before. It's a shame considering we can always use more NCI projects.
 
Jathanis, also be leary because this last batch could take up almost a gig of ram. Not really all that pleasant now that the ride is over.
 
Yeah, I checked this morning, and found I had one on my i7 rig - 700+ MB!
 
I am currently working on an extensive list of projects here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1801908
It is a work in progress and I intend to add more info and details to it. As you can imagine, it is a big project to undertake. I plan to also add additional posts making lists by subject matter for easier reference. If anyone has suggestions or additional info that they would like added, please PM me so that I can incorporate it.

Other than the category lists, I also am going to add:
whether a project has work regularly
possibly supported OS's and CPU types
badge projects
GPU's/no GPU's and the types supported
NCI projects
So, if people want to help me out by making a list and PM'ing it to me, that would take a load off of my plate. :)
 
So as an interesting observation on Plagerism@home - Even though it's listed in the WU as being NCI, it's pulling the same 12-12.5% CPU share as my other seven WUs (either Cosmology or Asteroids right now)... And looking over my results, it does seem that it's been dominating a single thread all day.

I'm hoping this is just more of the typical bugs on this project, but with this project's spotty history, I think I'm going to keep a closer eye on it!
 
That observation seems to have already been brought up in their forums. Definitely keep an eye on it if you are going to run it. But, that is what you should expect from Alpha/Beta projects after all...
 
Thanks for the heads up - I was going to go look after I opened the small Newegg box that came today... :) (A 533MHz bus Pentium 4? really? That'll be one for the museum!)

I've also been running Enigma for Android the past few days as a test, and it seems to be a nice tradeoff of shorter runtime units, and good daily points. So far, on my single core Galaxy Tab 7" overclocked from 1 - 1.2 GHz (this is [H]ard|OCP, right?), I've gotten the following results:
  • 6 30 point WUs, taking from 4,385 to 4,480 seconds
  • 2 52 point WUs, taking 7,633 and 7,683 seconds
  • 1 60 point WU, taking 9,234 seconds
  • 1 105 point WU, taking 15,846 seconds
Doing the math, that's about 23.5 to 24.5 pph, or between 550 and 600 ppd! Seeing as this same Tab was only getting about 150 ppd on Yoyo that past few weeks, and similar numbers months back on WCG FAAH and Primegrid, I'd suggest my fellow BOINC Android DCers check this one out. I'm going to try running it starting this weekend on my 1.5 GHz dual core Galaxy S3, and will report back accordingly.

(Still haven't gotten my hands on the wife's quad core 2.2 GHz Kindle Fire... :mad: I'd guess that 4X cores at 2X speed might clear 3,000 ppd - which would be unheard of for a tablet with little to no power draw!)
 
Jathanis said:
Thanks for the heads up - I was going to go look after I opened the small Newegg box that came today... :) (A 533MHz bus Pentium 4? really? That'll be one for the museum!)
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I told you I was giving you a variety in case you had to do more testing on boards. I ran into quite a few not too long back that wouldn't support anything past Pentium D....

And yes, Enigma runs pretty decent on Android devices.
 
Gilthanis,

I have a question for you.
I am currently runnung WCG, Rosetta, and WUProp projects on all 4 x 4p rigs (192 cores total).
Is it better to run all 3 projs at same time on each rigs or dedicate each rig/project?
 
sbinh said:
Gilthanis,

I have a question for you.
I am currently runnung WCG, Rosetta, and WUProp projects on all 4 x 4p rigs (192 cores total).
Is it better to run all 3 projs at same time on each rigs or dedicate each rig/project?
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I would attach all of the projects at the same time. BOINC will distribute work based on how you have your project priority set. By default, all projects are set to 100. However, if you wanted to set a project to be a backup project in the event a project goes down or runs out of work, then BOINC would request work from other projects. If you set your resource share to 0, it wont request work while projects with a higher share has work. WCG rarely goes down without notice, so typically you don't have to worry about them. Every once in a while, I will read where someone finds better efficiency running different apps, but I don't crunch the numbers like that. WUProp shouldn't matter that it is running since it is NCI. As a matter of fact, you don't get points if WUProp is the only BOINC work running. Now, the downside is...if one project has a bad batch of work, that can cause work from other projects to fail too. It rarely happens, but does from time to time. If you are going to support both Rosetta and WCG equally, then just attach all three projects and let BOINC do its juggling. It will try and keep CPU time somewhat equal.

A priority of 200 would get twice the time that priority 100 would get. Priority 50 would again get half the time that priority 100 gets. Priority 0 only requests work when other projects have none.

As an added benefit, (you can ask CaptainUnlikely about this) by having multiple projects on one system helps keep your cross project ID tied to all accounts so that your stats don't get split at stats sites between multiple accounts....
 
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