[ritzl]

I was just looking at Nounours and he seems to be using a stock worker on a high end machine. Is there a way to suggest to him/her that they could double, or more, their output using one of Alex's workers?

Perhaps I'm being too nosy, but I seems like much more credit could be had for the team. He's getting 2000 RAC with the stock client on a Mac Pro (probably 3.0 GHz) at 60 credits/8500 sec (about 25/hr).

We are at about the same place in the SETI list producing about the same RAC so I got curious. My C2D 2GHz iMac does 60 credits/4700 sec (45/hr) using Alex's 7.2 worker. He could be doing probably 60 credits/3000 sec with the v7.2 (70/hr). Probably more with v8.

So Nounours, if you're reading this...

[zombie67]

Great topic! I have the same question too. There are some valid reasons for not using an optimized application, such as when the machines are not under your direct or immediate control. Remember, it requires one to manually upgrade the application every time the project changes it. Also, there is always the (minor IMO) risk of reduced stability. That said, we have *way* too many folks crunching, and not maximizing their, and *our team's* credits.

I see two ways, push and/or pull.

1) Push: I assume the forum moderator(s) have access to the email addresses. I suggest a periodic mailing, with pointers to maximize credits, also referencing #2 if we do that too. Opting out should be possible, but no the default. It should *not* be tied to any other mailing, or the list shared with anyone else.

2) Pull: Host a monthly "How To" workshop. It could be here on the forum, or something more real-time like irc, AIM, IM, etc.

Discussion of optimized BOINC clients should be open, without pre-judgement. People should be able to learn the differences between them, how benchmarks work, how various projects quorum systems work, and if they decide to use them, the implications.

Soooo, next steps?

[ritzl]

Thanks Zombie.

On the push part, the Team MacNN resources page could contain links to Alex's latest workers. I only know that I have to sort through some pages of posts in order to get the latest. I know that digging in is part of the "fun," but if an ability to enhance credit were more obvious, it might be more widely embraced, and the team would benefit. I guess that's a duh! But at the same time, still probably only the most dedicated team members would dig even a little bit.

If the moderators have access to team members' emails, they could/should probably "push" the latest news. Perhaps this requires some sign off that "news/updates can be forwarded" in the registration here, but it could be done. It would give all team members the choice.

On the "Pull" part, I could not commit to doing that, though I believe it's a good idea. I'm sorry, I just have to agree.

What I will commit to, however, is to help on an exclusive MacNN Team Resources page. I can only contribute labor under direction, as am not particularly i/e savvy, but I will commit to maintenance of such a page. It's a great team in pursuit of great goals.

[reader50]

Some thoughts on these suggestions.

We can reach member emails on the forum, if the member has a forum registration. The team founder can reach member emails on most projects, including BOINC projects. However, it gets sticky beyond that point.

We've never used those emails in the past, and team members might not like unsolicited email from us coming out of the blue. Note that while many of us posters here are fairly serious about efficient crunching, many others surely think it's only an interesting idea. ie - set up a client to crunch in the background at minimum priority, or actually use the screen saver versions. And give it no further thought. Any such emails would have to be carefully worded, and we'd have to keep a list of who hadn't replied, so we don't hit on them again.

Scott and myself are not the founders of most of our later team registrations. A couple people have registered Team MacNNs and forwarded the account info to us, but most foundings are the personal crunch accounts of some of our regular members. We'd have to coordinate with them, since forwarding the account at this point would be asking a lot.

Our SETI BOINC team is a special case. It was cloned off the Classic SETI team by Berkeley rather than separately founded by us. It still lists as owned by our Classic founder, who was a MacNN staff member - since departed MacNN. Unfortunately, Berkeley assigned some random password rather than clone the Classic one.

To get the password, we need to have it sent to the registration email box. That box is an @macnn.com box, which hasn't existed for ~7-8 years. Once before, we prevailed on the site staff to temporarily recreate the address so we could capture the Classic password. We'd have to do that again before we could get access to the BOINC version.