[reader50]

The current supported list, in the order we jumped in:
SETI@home - will end sometime in favor of BOINC
RC5
Ubero - old work
Folding@home
Distributed Folding
D2OL

We've experimented with several other projects, including:
Genome@home - project cancelled, Mac client wasn't finished
Predictor@home
Evolution@home
Climate@home
LifeMapper
OGR
AstroPulse (SETI derivative)
(something I'm not thinking of right now)

Ubero keeps making noises like new work is coming, but I've not been seeing the new work, so dropping support is possible. That would mean turning off stats services (which several other teams use), but leaving the resource pages.

Feedback, please. Projects we are in deserve stats services, sigs, resource pages, milestones, etc.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
Feedback, please. Projects we are in deserve stats services, sigs, resource pages, milestones, etc.

My list of current activity.
SETI@home Classic - to be followed by SETI-BOINC
RC5
Folding@home
Distributed Folding
D2OL
Predictor@home

I dabbled with lifemapper and some others, but no "usable" Mac clients.
Astropulse lost their science guy, so is on hold for the moment. Still Beta.
Don't know if anyone here is doing Evolution@home. It is a manual project with only sporadic updates. Good for old machines though.
Climated Prediction starts closed beta testing on BOINC this month, so could eventually be an option.

[mikkyo]

Since the same stat engine/DB/layout/setup can be used for Predictor, Seti, and Astropulse, as well as any other boinc based clients, I think implementing it is probably a good idea.

[vaughan]

Hi Team MacNN,
I agree with the sentiment that Ubero's tasks are just being recycled and at reader50's request I'm contributing to your forum as me and not representing my team. Just about everyone has abandoned Ubero except AMD Users it seems! Myself I have an ancient P233mmx W95b running it (just).If you need to save the HDD space &/or bandwidth maybe you could suspend your stats page for Ubero.

I like your D2OL stats and check them at least daily. As TSC is a similar Sengent-based project it would be nice to see some TSC stats. Naturally, it is your server and bandwidth so do what you think is right.

I appreciate the fact that you have made the effort to create some very useful stats pages. Well done.

A couple of questions, I tried to find it myself but couldn't track them down - what do the colours mean in Active members (insane) Level (insane)? Also what triggers the various comments like "Turn on the music" and so on.
Cheers,
vaughan

[reader50]

I'm not sure why we are in D2OL but not much in TSC, perhaps Shaktai would know. Both projects appear to use the same client.

Regarding the colors, they show relative comparisons to nearby members, but the perspective depends on if you are looking at a Personal page, or any other kind of page.

Personal page: You are blue. Those that threaten you are Orange or Red, opportunities are shades of Green. Sorting does not change member's assigned colors, so the colors make the most sense when sorted by total stats.

Member pages (all other kinds): there is no selected user, so no one is blue. Orange / Red indicate those that are a threat to those above (with little/no threats to themselves), or those with major power, period. Shades of green indicate the easy meat, those that are going to get passed soon by nearby members. Once again, a resort does not change the assigned colors, which make the most sense when members are sorted by total stats. The Active pages are a special kind of sort, so the assigned colors there may not look "right". They do still indicate the situation each active member is in.

The various comments are triggered by nearby conditions, and are scaled for severity. As someone gets closer to you, the warnings grow louder. "Turn on the music" means the party is ready to begin, you are about to pass someone really soon, and it's a pretty sure thing.

[vaughan]

Thanks for the info reader50.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
I'm not sure why we are in D2OL but not much in TSC, perhaps Shaktai would know. Both projects appear to use the same client.

Both TSC and D2OL use the same software (Sengent) but the clients and background support are hardcoded to the project. There was never much interest shown in TSC by other team members, so we just never got into it. At one time D20L offered a chance for us to make the top 5, and maybe even the top two, but lack of participation killed that, along with D20L's long delays between updates with the status of results (still waiting). The new coordinator has improved things, but trying to get answers out of the project teams (who are mostly focused on TSC) has been difficult.

[reader50]

An update on supported projects, in the order we jumped into them.

Current Projects

SETI: Support will continue until they turn it off. They will turn it off once "BOINC is running smoothly and there are clients for most platforms". Right now BOINC appears to be in extended beta, and there are clients for very few platforms, so there is no obvious kill date.

RC5: Support continues for RC5-72.

Ubero: Unless someone speaks up, I'm going to turn Ubero stats off within a week and stop posting the Milestones. Stats will still be reachable, as will the resource and news pages, but stats will cease to update. Team MacNN shows 4 active members. AMD Users, UberoUno, and Team Picard have one active user apiece. That's a total of 7 active members for the project in our stats system.

Folding@home: Support continues.

Distributed Folding: Support continues.

D2OL: Support continues.

New Projects

BOINC (SETI): Support will be turned on for this. It will use the SETI section of the news site, and will be reached as a "seti2" folder on teamstats. Once SETI Classic gets turned off, I'll symlink "seti -> seti2" and it will be the official SETI@home.

Predictor@home: Support will be turned on for this. Krove may want to declare a news section for this project, but so far I have not seen much news from it. I'd imagine the main news page can cover it until it gets a section of it's own.

Other Projects

Lifemapper: We can turn this on if members get interested.
AstroPulse: If they get going and members show interest, it will get turned on.
ClimatePrediction: Members seem to be interested. If it exits beta, or otherwise makes stats available that are returned from Mac clients, request stats coverage.
Evolution@home: Project stats update once a month if you are lucky, no obvious member interest.
TSC: We can turn this on if members get interested.
OGR (dnetc): No obvious member interest. Is it still running?

--------------------

If there are other projects with Mac clients, feel free to post them. If someone wants coverage on a project that's not getting it, jump in and persuade us.

I'll be needing some benchmarks for SETI (BOINC) and Predictor in order to dial in stats coverage. If anyone has noticed that power estimates are way off for a current project, I'd like to know that too. It's about time to revise Milestones again, average CPU power has crept up enough to make the initial milestones too easy on some projects.

I have some free time until the end of this month, and need to fix a few small issues on teamstats. Things like the Fold server status, which always shows "offline" for the project servers, and purging of inactive teams that no one is watching. Then the new projects get added.

MacNN Forums has increased the allowed sig size from 140x40 to 200x50. We can update team sigs and stats sigs to the larger size if anyone wants this. It even helps make multi-project stats sigs possible, if a bit cramped. I'm told that vBB 3.x can properly handle image tags with variables, if that feature is turned on, so multi-project sigs will be a lot easier in the future.

[Shaktai]

Climate Prediction BOINC launch set for 26th August!
Sylvia Knight 13.08.04

climateprediction.net will move onto the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software platform on 26th August. Members of the project team will be in Oxford, Stockholm and Berkeley for the launch. A press release will be available nearer the time. New participants in climateprediction.net will be encouraged to use the new platform, however existing participants will be able to continue using the version of the experiment they are currently running, which will be supported indefinately.
Mac and Linux users will be able to participate for the first time.

Currently Team MacNN has 5 members who have returned results on the Beta Portion of the BOINC test. We are currently ranked #34 out of 117 teams. With the project going live on BOINC towards the end of the month, we may see an additional increase. I have put one box on the project, so team membership will be 6 in a few days.

PROS: Work units don't have to be validated by another user, so you get credit right away.
CONS: Work units are "huge" it can take weeks to complete one unit. However, the system does "trickle" credit in as you work, so you don't have to wait until the entire unit is done to see credit.
-- Climate Prediction is a "long term committement". Not for those who want quick, fast credit.
-- Climate Prediction uses a new version of BOINC (4.02) that cannot currently "resource share" with SETI or PREDICTOR. However, this new version is being alpha tested at SETI even now. Both those projects will probably move to it in the next month or so.

[siliconman]

Originally posted by reader50:
OGR (dnetc): No obvious member interest. Is it still running?

I like the dnet clients and OGR stats would be nice. I'd probably set my slow boxes to do OGR if there were Team stats, they don't do much for RC5 compared to my G4, OGR is of more benefit to science than RC5. (It would also aleviate some of the boredom of not moving anywhere in stats with RC5) I never got excited about SETI or the other projects.
I'm going to spend some time to see if I can build a dnet client from the public source that'll run in Classic. I've got about a dozen old macs to test it on that don't do OS X, and since dnet has killed the Classic client unless someone steps in, that's where I'm going to donate my spare brain cycles. (for the time being)

P.S. reader50, the sig images that show your team rank are still dead, can you add this to your to do list? thanks.

[reader50]

The Apache rewrite rules have been sent to Scott, that should enable stats sigs again. I'd meant to check on those last night.

I'll take a look at Climate and OGR stats. Has anyone noticed other projects that we have active teams in? For example, has the xgrid project developed stats, teams, and users?

Ubero stats will get turned off after the next Milestones on Wednesday. If you are just shy of a Milestone, this is your chance to crunch a little Ubero.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
For example, has the xgrid project developed stats, teams, and users?

Currently X grid stats consist of a brief growth history at http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xg...ain/stats.html and a "live gauge" at http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xg...uge/gauge.html

They are talking about some type of individual user stats eventually. No teams yet. It is a great little project for Mac users who want something simple and carefree to participate in, that requires no effort, no worries, no deadlines and a cute speed gauge screen saver. Whenever the other projects go down for an extended period, I switch my iBook over to it. You can participate a lot, or just a little.

As of the moment, they are down due to a network outage in their building. Should be back up later today. http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xg...ord/index.html

The requirement to run it is: A PowerPC macintosh (e.g. G3-G4-G5) with at least 128 MB RAM, running OS 10.2.8 or higher.

[Narwhal]

If you're looking for another BOINC project with Mac support there's Pirates@Home

Pirates@Home is a test of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. One goal of the project is to help develop a screensaver for Einstein@Home. At present Pirates@Home is not doing any real scientific computation. We are just having fun with BOINC.

http://pirates.vassar.edu/

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by Narwhal:
If you're looking for another BOINC project with Mac support there's Pirates@Home

Pirates@Home is a test of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. One goal of the project is to help develop a screensaver for Einstein@Home. At present Pirates@Home is not doing any real scientific computation. We are just having fun with BOINC.

http://pirates.vassar.edu/

Yes, but Pirates@Home is not really a public project, though they are allowing sign ups. They were Prematuraly announced in error. Work units are being sent out to only a very few participants. It is really just a test project to develop their system, and is not ready for large numbers of folks. When it is ready to go "prime time", it will be called Einstein@Home.

[reader50]

Looking for some tips from our experienced BOINC and Predictor members.

I've been looking at data sources for SETI (BOINC) and Predictor stats. The most convenient sources are some XML download files, which all the other stats gurus appear to use. Problem is, the projects claim to update those files only every 12 hours, and in the case of SETI, may update them only once per day. Can anyone confirm that the other BOINC stats sites are limited to 1-2 updates per day?

I'd like to have our stats update a lot more frequently, more often than the competition. On Predictor, I can pull the "regular" member page, if it updates more frequently. Have any of our Predictor regulars noticed the update frequency?

SETI will be more of a challenge, the member page defaults to only 20 members per page, which makes it 50 pages for Team MacNN. Most likely a form variable can be set to specify a larger display range. If anyone knows or can guess the form variable, let me know. Assuming that page will update more than once every 12 hours, it will give us an advantage over other stats sites.

[mikkyo]

I think the local client_state.xml is written to every 10 minutes or so.
There is a preference on the predictor user page for general prefs which applies to all projects(same on Seti page too) which has a "Write to disk at most every" setting.
This is also reflected in the <disk_interval> tag in global-Prefs.xml, so it could be overridden there as well.
Folks that want more local stats data can write it out more often.
I'm not sure how that is going to help you, but maybe clients that write to disk more update the server more?

It looks like you can track individual users via
http://predictor.scripps.edu/show_user.php?userid=787
and that data seems to be pretty current.
More than every 12 hours for sure, maybe not for seti.
So if you get the userid of all team members to track, you can have pretty current data.
You can get the userids from the team page.
And if you get the teamid, you can pull up the stats for members of that team, again in increments of 20.
Maybe the thing to do is walk the userids from 1-1M, heh.

Between the stats dumps here
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/
and the source for boinc, you can probably figure something out.
Maybe for our team we can have an up-to-the-minute data server where folks send their local xml files.

[Shaktai]

Predictor updates almost real time on the pages, but I am not sure about the xml files. I suspect that SETI is much less, because of the size of their files and the number of active participants is greater. The speed of the updates appears to be affected by server load but it is currently more then every 12 hours for the viewable pages. I suspect it is more then that for the XML as well, but cannot confirm it yet. I'll try to take a closer look at that tomorrow.

Doesn't anyone ever sleep around here?

[Nacente]

SETI@Home BOINC!

[reader50]

Assorted updates, in no particular order:

Our Folding@home server status is fixed. The QS bars once again report online (or otherwise) for each OS type.

The QS bar relay to the team site is working again. Strangely, it seems to update every 8-12 hours, but it's cronned to update every 30 minutes. It's working, but I should look into it further sometime.

Ubero stats are off. No one slipped in a last minute milestone.

Stats sigs and project symlinks on teamstats appear to be held up by firewall issues. Scott will try to look into it again this weekend.

The SETI QS bar messes up the project avg CPU time to zero. There is nothing wrong with the parse code for that, but the code works on my local box while messing up on teamstats. It appears to be the different PHP versions on the two boxes, and I need to work around it.

No one has shown interest in larger team sigs yet. Submissions welcome. I'll make up larger ones for new projects as they get turned on.

siliconman, you mentioned in another thread that you were waiting for the team RC5 proxy to come back. I'm afraid that both team proxies (SETI and RC5) have been discontinued. The RC5 proxy app is a free download, so anyone can set up a local copy to track their machines.

To any of our users interested in OGR stats, are you interested in OGR-24 or OGR-25? Both?

I have the various stats pages and files for Predictor and SETI (BOINC), need to start building the data parsers. Benchmarks still needed to dial in the power estimates and milestones, I can get some of that from our BOINC and Predictor threads.

[Narwhal]

For BOINC stat have you looked at http://www.setisynergy.com/stats/index.php

Zain has a quick reply about his resources for the stats here http://www.setisynergy.com/component...ums/Itemid,51/

[siliconman]

Originally posted by reader50:

siliconman, you mentioned in another thread that you were waiting for the team RC5 proxy to come back. I'm afraid that both team proxies (SETI and RC5) have been discontinued. The RC5 proxy app is a free download, so anyone can set up a local copy to track their machines.

I'm willing to host the dnet proxy I've already set it up for my own use, so if anyone on the team wants to jump on board that'll be fine with me. I don't have a true static IP, but I have DynDns pointing to my machine. siliconman.homeip.net when I get the ppstats perl job to work I'll make that data publically accessible also.

[siliconman]

OK, I've set up the proxy and the proxy stats generator. you can reach both at the host siliconman.homeip.net Right now it is only doing stats for RC5, but I'll probably start doing OGR stats once I finish tweaking the perl script that generates the stats code to suit my purposes. (and submit the changes back to the sourforge project)

Now I'm off to set up an OS 9 development machine to try and compile and rewrite the dnet classic macos port.

[Nacente]

Thanx this page is great!

[reader50]

Predictor stats will be first. Once they are done, SETI BOINC will get cloned from the Predictor codebase.

The backend data structure stuff has been worked out. The project's xml stats files are downloading and unzipping properly. Still needed: some parse code for the resulting files, a parser for our members page, and a few other adjustments.

I'm looking to have Predictor stats go live sometime this week, as evening coding allows.

[mikkyo]

Yay!
reader50, as always, rules!

[reader50]

reader50, as often happens, will be tardy again.

Real world business hit before Predictor was done. It will take a few more days after all.

Predictor needs 3 parsers, and assorted custom tweaks as to what graphs to show on the web pages, etc.

Project variable parser: done.
XML data parser: mostly done. Parse code is done, safety checks that abort a parse when there's been no update still needs doing.
Member parser: just started. This one is easy once the other two are done.
Project-specific file tweaks: not done.

We're most of the way there. 1-2 good evenings of coding and it will be ready. Please be patient, the Predictor stats are coming.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
reader50, as often happens, will be tardy again.

Real world business hit before Predictor was done. It will take a few more days after all.

Predictor needs 3 parsers, and assorted custom tweaks as to what graphs to show on the web pages, etc.

Project variable parser: done.
XML data parser: mostly done. Parse code is done, safety checks that abort a parse when there's been no update still needs doing.
Member parser: just started. This one is easy once the other two are done.
Project-specific file tweaks: not done.

We're most of the way there. 1-2 good evenings of coding and it will be ready. Please be patient, the Predictor stats are coming.

Don't sweat it. The project is still down for a few more days anyway. It will be well appreciated when done, but there is no big hurry.

[Zodiac]

Hi,

if you think about changing from Seti to Boinc,
i have blocked the team-name MacNN in the BOINC
database.
If you need it mail me !

Zodi


http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/...?teamid=113432

[Zodiac]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Zodiac:
Hi,

if you think about changing from Seti to Boinc,
i have blocked the team-name MacNN in the BOINC
database.
If you need it mail me !

Zodi


http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/...?teamid=113432 [/
QUOTE]

info@zodi.de

[reader50]

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/...p?teamid=30246

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/...p?teamid=30246

I was going to say, we are already there, at the link that Reader 50 provide. It is almost always set up as "Team MacNN" on all projects.

[reader50]

Found some more time, so an update.

Predictor needs 4 parsers, and assorted custom tweaks as to what graphs to show on the web pages, etc.

Project variable parser: done.
XML team data parser: done.
XML user data parser: done. (this parser got added)
Member parser: done.
Project-specific file tweaks: started.

Completed code can't be tested fully because the project is offline. Once they come back, a couple days of testing will turn up any remaining bugs. I saved static copies of the various project pages/files and can test against those, but that only gives initial data. Checking user and team movements require multiple data points.

Edit: got a little more done, updated.

[reader50]

I tried running the backend Predictor files for the first time tonight. They crashed and burned spectacularly, on every one of my code errors.

(insert some quality debugging hours)

The Members parser has a couple bugs left to track down, the other parsers are fixed. Predictor stats are displaying on my local system for the first time.



You can see one of the remaining glitches, plus the missing graphic, but it's good to be getting an output finally.

The display files need adjusting along with those Predictor-specific graphics, and it would be nice to get fresh data from Predictor to verify that everything works. Regardless, it's about time we got our BOINC stats going.

[reader50]

Most everything is done except the Sig graphics and the reference rates/milestones. I'll make up Sig(s) tomorrow and try to figure up typical crunch rates from the various threads.

Sig submissions welcome. Like some other projects, Predictor hasn't put much effort into graphics. I've been tempted to create a graphic from UT2004 screen shots. Bad guy in black running towards pic-right, minigun and crosshair pointed at pic-right, with an arrow showing you are predicting the target's future position. Alas, the project people might be very unhappy with such a graphic.

Submissions of typical crunch rates per box welcome also. Not client benchmarks please, those sound a bit unreliable. Much of the posted info predates the optimized builds, and the info posted since is largely the client benchmarks.

Barring unexpected problems, I can put up Predictor almost anytime, and turn it on when the project starts updating stats again.

ps - this means the code is assumed to be mature, and can be cloned to other BOINC projects. SETI was going to be next, but Climate has been more popular lately. So I'll take sig suggestions or rates per box for any of the three BOINC projects.