[Scotttheking]

Since I surpassed my one million point goal in folding, I have spent some time searching for something new to run. After a bit of testing, I have settled on running BOINC. However, I am not running only a single project...
Instead, I'm focusing on raising our team ranking here. I have setup all of the boinc clients to run a mix of the boinc based projects on that site. Using the boincstats bam to control my clients from a single site, I have a small but growing set of machines running projects. The site lets me change projects and project weights, among other settings, from a single website, which is extremely useful for remote machines.
I prefer to focus my time on projects that are meaningful to me, and thus much of my attention is focused on biological projects.
For those who are interested, here is the breakdown for the projects I'm running:

50 - BBC Climate Change Predict the earth’s climate up to the year 2080
50 - Climate Prediction Study climate change
20 - Einstein@Home Search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars
1 - HashClash
20 - Leiden Classical
50 - LHC@Home Improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator
100 - Predictor@Home Investigate protein-related diseases
50 - QMC@Home A project designed to further develop the Quantum Monte Carlo method for general use in Quantum Chemistry.
1 - RieselSieve Project to find prime numbers of the form k*2^n-1, to show k=509203 is the smallest Riesel Number
100 - Rosetta@Home Help researchers develop cures for human diseases
50 - Seasonal Attribution Help to find out whether human-induced climate change is responsible for some extreme weather events.
5 - SETI@Home Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life
100 -SIMAP Protein sequence comparison to support manifold biological research
1 - SZTAKI Desktop Grid Find generalized binary number systems up to dimension 11
100 - Tanpaku Help predicting protein structures using the Brownian Dynamics method.

The total for the weights is 698.
As you can see I'm devoting the majority of my time to bio projects, while still running others. The breakdown isn't as accurate as listed above, however, due to some of the projects being out of work, or not having clients for all operating systems, and me not allowing all projects to run on all machines. However, it does provide an idea of what my systems are now doing.

The nice thing about boinc is it provides a ranking across all projects.
My aggregate stats are here.
As you can see, while I have little in any one project, my overall stats are going up by a decent amount.

Hopefully this shift will provide a nice boost for the team in several smaller projects, plus boost our standings on the DC Vault stats.

I do have some questions about boinc:
First, I know there are some optimized clients for some operating systems. Which clients and OS' are these, and how do I install them?
Second, is there a way to create a package (even just a tar file) which contains everything to auto attach to the account manager listed above (boincstats) so that I can drop a client on a machine, install / start it, and have it run, attach, and start? It obviously can't be fully setup on my local machine, since the ID will be tied to this computer, and that is a major fault.
Third, is there a set of clients that run better on different hardware? Which are these?

Thanks,
--Scott

[beadman]

My experience has been that Einstein recently has diddled with the credit awards so that the majority Intel machines "earn" the same credit for the same work as in SETI. The problem with this is that Macs are now performing on average about 80%, give or take, of the credit awarded for SETI. I've shifted my iBook G4, PowerBook G4, and MacBookPro to around 900 SETI/2 Einstein. I still leave my old 333MHz G3 set at 100/100, as it actually performs better with the Einstein standard client than the SETI standard client (I can't run Alex's optimized clients on the G3.)

I thought about protesting at Einstein, but realized how I'd look walking around with a sign that said "Einstein unfair to Macs"

My $0.02, for what it's worth.
beadman

[zombie67]

For those who are interested, here is the breakdown for the projects I'm running:

50 - BBC Climate Change Predict the earth’s climate up to the year 2080
50 - Climate Prediction Study climate change
-> Careful about these. I can't recall the exact details, but they don't work well with other projects. Something about how they save work-to-date. Since those check points are so far apart (something like 24 hours?), unless you set BOINC to "leave applications in memory", you lose work when you have BOINC change projects every hour. in other words, they never make any progress. The way I got around this was to calculate the percentage that I wanted to run, and then put the project exclusively on the appropriate number of computers. In my case, a single X2 4200+. So I have two WUs running for several months.

20 - Einstein@Home Search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars
-> I run this one too.

1 - HashClash
->Windows & Linux only. Also, if these allocations are all on the same machine(s), I doubt you will ever complete a WU in before it expires. This isn't F@H...=;^)

20 - Leiden Classical
50 - LHC@Home
->Windows & Linux only.

100 - Predictor@Home Investigate protein-related diseases
-> Dead...at least for now.

50 - QMC@Home
->Windows & Linux only.

1 - RieselSieve Project
->Windows only.

100 - Rosetta@Home
50 - Seasonal Attribution
->Windows & Linux only.

5 - SETI@Home
->Be sure to use alexkan's application!

0 -SIMAP
-> Periodic project. More works starting 11/01!

1 - SZTAKI Desktop Grid
-> Again, allocation too small.

100 - Tanpaku
->Windows & Linux only. Also, the project team doesn't seem to be very responsive.

The total for the weights is 698.
As you can see I'm devoting the majority of my time to bio projects, while still running others. The breakdown isn't as accurate as listed above, however, due to some of the projects being out of work, or not having clients for all operating systems, and me not allowing all projects to run on all machines. However, it does provide an idea of what my systems are now doing.

->I created a spreadsheet with a matrix of projects and machines, including their average daily credits. Now I can mess with weight and subscription "knobs" to figure out the total work each project will end up with on a daily basis.

Hopefully this shift will provide a nice boost for the team in several smaller projects, plus boost our standings on the DC Vault stats.

-> I've been trying to get our stats up in several projects too. If I may be so bold, I like to think I have had more than a little impact on our team standing with these: Docking, WCG, SIMAP.

[zombie67]

More thoughts:

I was have quite a few macs as well as PCs (most of which I bought as referbs).

o My first plan of attack for the PCs was to wipe the drives of all that evil microsoft sw, and replace it with linux. Huge mistake. For many projects that still rely on benchmarks, linux machines get lower scores. More importantly, when running multiple projects, jobs regularly get "stuck". BOINC will say they are running, but the "CPU time" counter does not increase, and the CPU meters are at 0%. This means you have to monitor them constantly, and will miss out on crunching time. I tried both Ubuntu, and SuSe, for several months. I have since converted them to windows, and they now run perfectly.

o Macs do not compete well with PC for most projects, at least not the PPC versions. Not fair, but it is what it is. PPC Macs just crunch less (and I think they get less credit with benchmarks too). But, with alexkan's app, all Macs are turned into S@H savants. And I am not talking about just inflating credits, but the app actually increases their productivity to an amazing degree. Makes windows machines look slooooooow, even with their own optimized apps*. So I have recently made a decision. My Mac's will now exclusively crunch for SETI. Crunching anything else is just a waste of their cycles. And my (now) windows PCs will now crunch "everything else". This also has the added benefit of increasing my total daily credit, because each machine is applied to the projects they do best.

* http://lunatics.at/

[Knightrider]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking

I do have some questions about boinc:
First, I know there are some optimized clients for some operating systems. Which clients and OS' are these, and how do I install them?
--Scott

So far as I am aware, SAH is the only project that tolerates optimized apps. Attempts have been made for Einstein and Rosetta, but were positively discouraged and they now make an effort to keep there workers optimized.

Second, is there a way to create a package (even just a tar file) which contains everything to auto attach to the account manager listed above (boincstats) so that I can drop a client on a machine, install / start it, and have it run, attach, and start? It obviously can't be fully setup on my local machine, since the ID will be tied to this computer, and that is a major fault.

If you are able, or you know someone who is, it is open to you to write a program that will do what you want. Security would be a major issue I would think. There are a lot of add-on programs for BOINC you can see HERE and HERE

I use THIS
site for my cross-project stats (Working up to my 1 million I notice). DC Vault looks interesting.

K.

.

[zombie67]

Originally Posted by Knightrider 

So far as I am aware, SAH is the only project that tolerates optimized apps. Attempts have been made for Einstein and Rosetta, but were positively discouraged and they now make an effort to keep there workers optimized.

Actually, Einstein creates their own optimized applications. There is even a very good one for G5 Macs here:

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/app_test.php

Once they pass beta, they are incorporated into the normal app.

[Knightrider]

Now I have past my sah 1/2 mil I also, am re-assigning my PC's.

The Mac Quad stays with SAH

The Intel P4 3.2 goes to einstein for the moment but there are a couple of projects in development which I will take a look at when they come up. Most notably PlanetQuest and nano@home

The new intel core2 (winXP pro) (It was a cheaper option than Apple) goes to Climate Prediction, as long as it works ok.

K.

[Scotttheking]

Thanks for all the comments above.
I've now passed 10k points in BOINC as a whole, rising at over 1k points per day.

A few comments to above, in no particular order:
I changed it so the Macs (PB 1.5GHz and mini 1.25GHz) only run SETI.

I have a mix of Mac, Windows, and Linux, so all of the projects do run. I have tweaked each box so that, for instance, only the fast one runs climate prediction, and such. As a result, my weightings are not followed very well.

I'm pretty sure that BOINC will run tasks that need to be finished soon, no matter what their allocation, and I haven't noticed a problem with work not being finished.

I did notice the issue with Linux, that is quite annoying. Even more annoying, I had a box today that wouldn't run the Linux client. It gave weird errors. I didn't feel like dealing with it, so I just threw Windows on the box for now.

Since I started my meager production has served to boost our standings a bit in the DC Vault, as many of the projects do not require much in the way of production to push us up.

I expect that my machines are getting close to their peak production, but you never know...Also, I hope to have a little something extra coming in the next week or two

Stay tuned for more.

--Scott

[zombie67]

What's your BOINC userid?

[Scotttheking]

Scott / Scotttheking

[zombie67]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking 

Scott / Scotttheking

Ah. I forgot to uncheck "exact match". Duh.

[Scotttheking]

I accidentally signed up under 'Scotttheking' for some things, and am slowly changing them...

One thing I'm having an issue with is the account manager not distributing preferences properly. It seems they aren't taking, but I haven't had time to work on it enough.

[zombie67]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking 

I accidentally signed up under 'Scotttheking' for some things, and am slowly changing them...

One thing I'm having an issue with is the account manager not distributing preferences properly. It seems they aren't taking, but I haven't had time to work on it enough.

If you are talking about SETI, it's a known problem. The solution is to create a new profile (school/work/etc), and move your machine(s) to that new profile. It then works.

[zombie67]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking 

I accidentally signed up under 'Scotttheking' for some things, and am slowly changing them...

One thing I'm having an issue with is the account manager not distributing preferences properly. It seems they aren't taking, but I haven't had time to work on it enough.

Also, if you want to use a BOINC Account Manager, your USERID and your email need to be the same across all your projects.

[Scotttheking]

So does that mean I need to set everything to 'Scotttheking' since my account manager username is Scotttheking?

--Scott

[zombie67]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking 

So does that mean I need to set everything to 'Scotttheking' since my account manager username is Scotttheking?

--Scott

We're talking about BAM, right? I think that is correct. See here:

http://www.boincstats.com/page/faq.php?pr=bam

[Scotttheking]

I've been testing this, and it appears as long as my ID is the same, the actual username can be different, but preferences aren't being pushed much. Will play around more.

--Scott

[Shaktai]

Welcome to BOINC Scott.

[Scotttheking]

*zips throught 100k points*

[larrinski]

My Intel Imac seems to really bog down with BOINC running. It is like it has a hard time waking up and doing intensive tasks. All seems fine if I turn BOINC off. Anyone else with a Core Duo having the same probs?