Msg from VJ

[DooKey]

My apologies to Kendrak and the rest of the forum. I let my anger with PG get the best of me and I took it out on Kendrak. Sorry for the thread derail and illplaced anger towards Kendrak.

 

[Untitledone]

Notes from an old curmudgeon...

I was here before the advent of bigadv. bigadv was, and still is, an experiment and never considered to be a permanent fixture on the folding@home scene. There was never, ever, a guarantee that points would be consistent, stable, or any other noun you want to impose.

Recognizing how crack addicts must feel, I am strongly beginning to believe there are many too wrapped up in points and maintaining their status quo on the various top e-peen lists. Within reason, given their financial investment in this hobby, I can understand their concerns when there is a lack of bigadv work units. However, these people need to understand that bigadv is really a niche aspect to the research that F@H does.

The shortage that some are now experiencing with bigadv units is a result of Pande Group prioritizing where they need the work the most and right now that is on SMP work units. Vijay has stated this himself so please do not lay blame on Kendrak or anyone else. If there is no work available for bigadv, there is no work available. Plain and simple. Yes, you invested significant financial dollars to enable bigadv calculations on your rig, but no one ever stated bigadv would be a plentiful, and permanent, fixture.

Going forward, and rather than more points nerfing, I'd almost prefer seeing the thread restriction on bigadv increase from 8 to 16 on -bigadv. 8 threaded CPUs are extremely plentiful right now, for fair prices, and can crunch through some SMP units very quickly.

On Stanford's end, points for SMP units need to increase a bit. We really don't want/need those with silver spoons stuck in all orifices to run away with all of the points. I believe BA points are fine where they are but SMP could use some loving and buffing.

Anyway, these are a few my ramblings after listening to several over the past few days. Thanks to Kendrak for picking up the DAB Chalice when I unexpectedly left earlier in the year.

We should lock the thread after this lol. Needs sticky.

 

[Kendrak]

Ohh no, there is more to come in a day or so.

 

[Untitledone]

Ohh no, there is more to come in a day or so.

That does not sound good...

NINJA EDIT: Tobit informed me of some of the info. I am at peace. Tobit in a drunken monkey fest did not realize how good his post was.

 

[Kendrak]

I think it will bring back some harmony to the system.

 

[x98gulinski]

The changes sound decent so far. I'm all for getting through whatever it is the project needs worked so keep putting me to work.

 

[Syran]

I hate to muddy the water, but I oppose point inflation, it devalues historic point bases built up with great effort and expense on older hardware.

I really respect the black and blue folders that are in the top thousand...that took some doing.

Unfortunately, I think that is by and far already gone simply from SMP and BigADV WUs, your better test on the historic value would be by judging the number of WUs completed without the point system.

 

[Nathan_P]

Noticing the comments about SMP I just looked at psummary. There are lots of projects using the A4 core. IIRC this core autoscales to smp if it detects a multicore chip. Given that most CPU's out there are at least dual core this increases the number of SMP wu available several times over thus leading to a backlog. Perhaps they should flag the A3 core projects as having higher priority over A4 especially if it is to clear a backlog of older project work.

Something they may want to consider - especially if rumors of the A6 core doing the same are true.