Posts by Bigred

21) Message boards : Number crunching : Source code improvement discussion (Message 5436) Posted 10 Oct 2008 by Bigred Post: I don't know if this helps, but you can get a free version of Microsoft visual studio here. http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/
22) Message boards : Number crunching : Peer Review...Seti vs. Boinc (Message 4578) Posted 31 Jul 2008 by Bigred Post: I left Seti a long time ago over things that I didn't like. If we're forced to accept the Boinc credit system I will stop running Boinc projects. There are several DC projects that don't use Boinc and I think they will see a large influx of former Boinc users. Here is a list of some of them. http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
23) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit Calculations. (Message 4470) Posted 25 Jul 2008 by Bigred Post: First, I've had a lot of fun reading this thread. It has taken up a lot of my boring time at work. Now for my 5 cents (inflation). Inflation is a fact of life. I can remember buying gas for my car for $.17 a gallon. Try that now. Not everybody gets paid the same for the amount of effort they provide. If you work at a burger place and make $6 an hour and I work at another one and make $7 an hour are you saying that my pay should be reduced? Have you never changed jobs for better pay? Are you saying that a Doctor and an EMT should be paid the same? The bottom line is that life is not about everything being fair and equal. Most of us do not live in a communist society. We have the right to make decisions. I, along with many others, made the decision to leave SAH and Predictor because we didn't like what was going on. There are only 2 ways that I see that everything can be made equal. 1. wipe out all credit given across the board and give out no credit at all, which is not likely to happen. 2. Have a credit system incorperated into Boinc that does not allow the projects to set the credit given. Also not likely to happen. I will continue to work the projects that I like without concern about the amount of credit given compared to other projects.
24) Message boards : Number crunching : No work from project ... (Message 985) Posted 10 Dec 2007 by Bigred Post: No work again. Pipeline seems to be empty. Looks like it is broken again. The question is for how long.
25) Message boards : Number crunching : No work from project ... (Message 834) Posted 30 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: It seems like we still have a problem. I took 2 of my quads off the project until it gets straightened out.
26) Message boards : Number crunching : Updated Erroneous Credit (Message 788) Posted 29 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: 41,697 credit is the amount you need to credit back to me just in case you don't know. You were another person with extremely high avg credit for a single computer (over 600) and this just wasn't in line with what everyone else was getting. This was similar to all the other machines that had received erroneous credit for work units. Looking in the database now, i only reduced the work on your Xeon, and left the others alone (because they were more realistic), however, it seems i didn't leave their credit for you, so i'll update that. Maybe leave your xeon crunching for a day so i can see what kind of credit it's getting? It really did seem very off from the other machines out there (that hadn't gotten extremely high credit for a couple work units), having at least 2x the avg credit of anything else. unfortunately the exact workunits that gave the bad credit weren't still in the database so i just had to go by removing credit from computers that looked really off. A dual Xeon is a very powerful machine. It is comparable to a Quad core which if my calculations are correct should be able to process about 1000 WU's a day if it is running this project exclusively. Where one of the big differences comes in is that a LOT of people run multiple projects on each computer at once. So 2 identical computers could have very different results depending on how many and which projects they are running.
27) Message boards : Number crunching : server really back up (Message 786) Posted 29 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: Just finished the first 2 with no problems.
28) Message boards : Number crunching : server really back up (Message 784) Posted 29 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: It looks like i can download work and the new binaries on all my machines running boinc. Is it working for everyone else? Just checked my account and it appears that all my machine are downloading new work as they check in.
29) Message boards : Number crunching : server back up (i hope) (Message 781) Posted 29 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: I've got WU's to this computer. I had to do a detach and then reattach to get them though. I'll check the rest of my computers tomorrow.
30) Message boards : Number crunching : Keeping Us Up To Date (Message 720) Posted 28 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: I've been trying to keep the news updated (somewhat more briefly than what's in here) whenever something new happens. Other more minor details i'm keeping here in the forums :) Dear Travis, I DO NOT second the original proposal of this thread! You do a magnificent job of keeping us informed about what's going on (e.g. server crash, electricity blackout, etc.). You do this in a much more detailled way than in most other BOINC projects. Plus you DO listen to the suggestions that are made in this forum (e.h. credits, cheating, etc.) Thank you very much for this effort and keep this information policy! I feel like this project does a good job of keeping information flowing, also. Especially like last night when they were trying to update the binaries but ran into other problems. They posted several messages on the front page explaining what was happening. Keep up the good work. The messages only turned up after this topic started. Other than that we were waiting for the best part of 12 hours for info. If you really think this project is doing such a bad job, check this one. Xtremelab
31) Message boards : Number crunching : resetting credit (Message 646) Posted 27 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: I suggest you screen just the Top-20 users for manipulated credits and manually reset them to 1. All the rest would probably be much too much work and will most probably upset all users. Now hang on... I was the participant leader here for a bit, and am still in the top 20. I have never done anything but used standard BOINC clients, and fiddling with benchmarks. Check with my BOINCstats history. I have done no wrong. And resetting my 33k hard earned credits (especially with all the pop-ups!) is unfair. However, perhaps you mean to reset each result to 1, rather than set the total credits to 1? That I can agree with if it is applied to everyone, not just the top 20 or whatever. Don't overreact. All that was said was to SCREEN the top 20 users. This shouldn't upset you unless you have something to hide.
32) Message boards : Number crunching : resetting credit (Message 638) Posted 27 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: Anything you do about this situation is going to make some people upset. A fair and generous system will attract a lot more users and cause the ones that want to bend the rules to go elsewhere. You should post news in advance stating what you are going to do. That way it will not come as a surprise to anybody. I would suggest a flat credit per WU and throw out all the wierd credits. As to the amount of credit per WU, I would think that 2 is the minimum. As an example my Quad crunches a WU in about 5:45. That works out to about 250 WU's per core per day. At a flat credit of 2 that works out to about 2000 credits a day. This is acceptable but a little low when I can get 3000-3500 a day at SETI using a standard client. BTW Thanks for upping the limit 20 20 WU's at a time. It seems to have resolved the running out of work issue.
33) Message boards : Number crunching : So you want us to try to beat your supercomputer. (Message 615) Posted 26 Nov 2007 by Bigred Post: [quote]Also, we're using the results to compare doing this work on BOINC to the BlueGene supercomputer at RPI. Who knows, with enough participants in the project -- you guys might beat out the 7th fastest supercomputer in the world! [/quoted] If that is the truth, you will need to make some changes in order to attract more of the serious crunchers and the everyday guys that do what they can. First the 8 WU limit needs to go. Some projects limit the number of WU's at first but as you return them your limit is increased. If I run this project exclusively on one of my Quads it goes through the 8 WU's in about 12 minutes and sits idle for another 8 minutes before downloading more WU's. This is unacceptable as it is a waste of crunching. Also it negates the practice of most experienced crunchers use of trying to keep 3 or 4 days of work available. They do this so they will allways have work even when the project runs out of work, server goes down or even if the server is being maintained on a regular basis. Have each WU run on 2 or 3 different computers to help prevent overinflated credit from so called optimized clients. Use larger WU's. While it is fun to watch a Quad zip through 6 minute WU's, four at a time a 1 to 2 hour WU will use less overhead and cause more efficient work. Be generous (but not silly) with credit. A lot of projects are skimpy with credit and the crunchers with the really big systems will stay away from them because they can get more credit elsewhere. As a reference a Quad on Sudoku will get about 2200 - 2500 credits a day. This is somewhat on the low end. The same machine on SETI will get between 3000 and 3500. Keep in mind that this is not to critisize but just some advice from a long time cruncher.

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