To many Projects are TU

[mitchellds]

ABC, Rieselsive, Cosmo.., I'm starting to feel like I'm wasting my GHZ. Whats wrong with these sys-admins running these projects? They cant get their acts together.

[vaughan]

+ SHA-Collision over the weekend and when it came back on-line they didn't post about why they were AWOL.

+ lots of minor projects ... Mind Modeling, GeneticLife has been hard to get tasks, Milkyway also has a tendency to drop out too.

[Bok]

You can actually get to abcathome by adding some local dns..

On linux hosts add

132.229.228.47 abcathome.com

to the /etc/hosts

on windows add it to

c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts

and it will then connect.

I've just added it to the free-dc server and it's updating the stats right now..

I was a bit peeved as I'd just started crunching it, going for my 100K in the 18th project when it fell over, leaving me with around 50 wu's unsent.. They've all just gone through..

Bok

[Sou'westerly]

Hi BOK. Thanks for the info, did you manage to get your team back from the hijackers?
Dave.

[mitchellds]

Thanks Bok.

[Bok]

Hi BOK. Thanks for the info, did you manage to get your team back from the hijackers?
Dave.

Nope, no response from the nano-hive admins unfortunately :(

If it comes online again I'm sure we'll get it back, but with it being almost dead it's going to be difficult..

I'm sure we'll get Ralph back at some point though..

Bok

[Nflight]

mitchellds, Unless you have all the time in the world to fiddle with the ups and downs Boinc Projects have. I left them due to that reason.

I have only so much time to spend with maintaining projects anymore. I want to make sure people know I am still here, but I have less and less time to keep the projects up and running.

I found non-boinc projects are much less strenuous on the hair pulling area, and even work for days or weeks without having to cringe whether the project will be up when I return several days later.

I am not frivolously expending hard earned income funds that could go to something else when my systems would be idle running BOINC projects. So I went with non-boinc projects and feel I am accomplishing great things with out losing anymore of my hair on my head. :icon_wink:

On the downside of all this is the fact you have earned a posting of great output in the BOINC projects. Your ranked high on the scale of achievements. I too was trying to push for great things in BOINC ranking, when one day I just decided it was better to use the system 24/7 without feeling horrible when I would lose, like you put it several Ghz for no apparent reason. It was like a mental block I had lifted myself to believe I had to be good or better, great. I reached the top 5,000 in BOINC ranking and was hoping for more when the systems would not budge.

As you can see on my signature I am no longer drawn by Team ranking. I have only two main systems to dabble in and feel my continued effort and support of AMD Users is hard at work whether I am 4 counties over in a farmers manure pile or able to stop in and read my email. (after a soapy shower of course) :)

It took some 30 or more days of strength to wean myself off of the frustrating BOINC. I even thought about diving back into it a couple of times. Feeling left out, non-participating sort-of, I thought I was not doing my part. But, I am doing my part and in a big way!!!

I can not beg you to try a little change once in awhile, just like our food selection, no one likes to eat the same thing over and over. It is the ability to change our course of action and make new strides in different areas we never worked before. This gives us new hope and distinguished relief of frustration.

Try a Non-BOINC project for 2 weeks and remove your self completely from BOINC at the same time! Are you addicted to BOINC or just the statistics? If you get something accomplished and see your stats rise is it the same just not in the BOINC arena? :blob3:

[Jason1478963]

I just stick with WCG and they seem to keep my stuff busy :)

[vaughan]

Try a Non-BOINC project for 2 weeks and remove your self completely from BOINC at the same time! Are you addicted to BOINC or just the statistics? If you get something accomplished and see your stats rise is it the same just not in the BOINC arena? :blob3:
Wieferich@Home (http://www.elmath.org/) is very stable and has never run out of work yet.

[Bender10]

If people are looking for non-Boinc projects...TSC and D2OL could use a few cycles once and a while. My Borged boxes are pretty sporatic so far this summer. I may have to run some wu's on my own boxes :shocked:, if things don't pick up a little.


And for those out of the loop. PS3grid now supports some newer Nvidia gpu's running under *nix 64. Go to http://www.ps3grid.net/forum_forum.php?id=1, for details.

[Brucifer]

Nice to see that you left the Dark Side nflight. :icon_mrgreen:

Once upon a time I was in to beta testing on boinc. And without a doubt there are a few boinc projects that are excellently run with more than sufficient infrastructure, funding, and intelligence. The sad thing to me about boinc is that basically it has enabled every junkyard wannabee out there to run a project. Some of those projects are interesting and have a good premise and all, however the support just isn't there. Many of them have shut down with no warning. There are also a number of them that are just plain unreliable, they run today for a while, then don't for a while. Many don't have work, or don't process it, or run out of work and take forever to assign more, or run out of work for one platform but not another, and on and on. WCG is one of the projects that is run with much forethought. Some start out well, and then fall on hard times... seti comes to mind. Boinc was an outgrowth of the seti effort.

Anyway, I just sit in amusement and have to laugh over all the drama and histrionics over a number of the boinc project problems. Many, many of them shouldn't be running. Then aren't funded worth a hoot, however well intentioned they may be. I put some time and effort into some boinc projects only to have them shutdown out of the blue, etc. I got tired of it, and that is one of the main reasons why I don't touch boinc projects anymore. Stuff like that has soured many people on the DC efforts. It's not the same now as it was back in the days when seti was all the rage. :(

And nflight, it isn't only the boinc ones that have the corner on poorly run projects... remember ditributed folding? Or there was one on evolution that was cool, the name escapes me now, but it was a fun one and then whammo.... they went offline. Or how about the non-boinc D2OL that went through the whole points fiasco thing and lost tons of the previous crunchers? But at least D2OL is still plugging away.

A new boinc project comes out and too many just flock to it like a herd of flies in a barnyard on a fresh pile of cow dung.... And what have all these fly-by-night projects accomplished other than wasting a ton of electricity?

I'm not personally a fan of F@H clients, however, Pande (or whatever his name is) has to be commended for having one of the most progressive and organized projects out there that has stood the test of time. He even got Sony programming for him.... not many have done that. But it is one of the few excellent projects out there. There are also a few math projects that have been chugging away for a long time, SOB comes to mind right off the top of my head..... GIMPS has been around a long time, and some others also. And the interesting thing is there is a paucity of boincness among them. :) Some of them take a bit a manual intervention, and they aren't simple projects to run. But they have a following, a long term one, and they are devoted.

One area of nflight's comments was intriguing though... the part that was referencing boinc statistics addiction. :) I got a good chuckle over that. But you do know that once you quit crunching all those stats, all those points, and $1.25 will still only buy you a $1.25 cup of coffee... in fact the truly amazing thing is you don't even need those points. For some reason the only thing they seem really interested in is the $1.25

Go figure...

[Lagu]

I haven´t been running Boinc since our last race I think. I began turn me away from Boinc. I ran D20L, MoneyBee, Wieferich. Then I began run SoB and because they not have a platform developed for 2 or more cores, I now run SoB on one core and Wieferich on the other.

And all my computers run Non-Boinc project. I think I not will run Boinc:icon_evil: again. It should be over my dead body.:5cold: It is my feeling right now. My Intel PII runs EoN as the only project.

Lagu:icon_wink:

[sentient_life]

Wow, all very good points. I'll add my two cents to the discussion. I think the overall choice as to what projects to run and what not to run is up to the person paying for the electricity and hardware costs. There are several different avenues within our team that I think makes us one of the best distributed computing groups in the world. We are number 2 in the DC-Vault, which ranks both BOINC and non-BOINC together. That is something to be very proud of. This is a hobby for all of us. Its great teamwork when we try to overtake other teams.

Some people run non-BOINC projects only, some run just BOINC, and some run everything. Some join every new project that starts up, and some have joined only one. Some have one AMD single-core computer that's 4+ years old, and some have huge pharms of overclocked Q6600's. Some crunch for points, and some crunch for scientific value. It simply shows how different we all are, and how we all come together in this.

As for myself, I gladly join and run as many of the medical, science, and physics projects BOINC/non-BOINC that are out there -- with a couple of exceptions such as DepSpid and Dimes, because they use virtually no CPU cycles. I did run dnet years ago, until they pulled the prize challenge:icon_wink:. I have not joined any of the Math projects. No offense intended, but I don't see a scientific value in trying to determine a gazillion place prime number or all of these x^2=(y+a)/b-1 theorems! (I hated Geometry in High School, but loved Algebra/Precalc, go figure.)

An issue I've seen relates to the amount of points given out. I've seen several complaints that this project gives too many, and that one doesn't give enough. Why does it matter if the science is valid and may help cure malaria/dengue/cancer, or we find an asteroid that might collide with the planet in our lifetime? (Trying to find ET can be debated:)) However, there are so many projects out there, that I have to set a limit/goal of around 100k that I feel has been a sufficient amount of contribution to their research.

In regards to BOINC, I don't have enough problems with it to stop cold turkey. The client seems pretty simple to join projects and crunch workunits, with not too much intervention necessary. You can set to suspend or 'no new work' or detach as you like. The developers are constantly working on improving it. Yes, there are many problem projects that are utilizing it. A few admins/scientists start-up these things, and don't seem to realize how much work goes into it. APS, GeneticLife, Magnetism, Cosmology, and Hydrogen for example have just one person crews (if I'm not mistaken) running the show and are not backed up by a university of volunteers. Dealing with server crashes, workunit generation and crashes, DNS issues, second jobs, all take away from them running a successful project. I fail to see why the BOINC platform itself is completely at fault.

[Brucifer]

I fail to see why the BOINC platform itself is completely at fault.

I don't think anyone has said that the boinc platform itself is at fault. It has enabled people to run a project that were/are not really prepared to run a project is about the extent of the comments on boinc. As for the reference to the person paying the electricity being the one to choose the project, that is most definitely germane! :)

[Borfil]

Well, I have crunch numbers on and off since 2000 , lost a few account with Seti and came back last year. I been steady since and have only one preocupacion.:sad5: Will I make a difference! I like to think that I will and I'm making a difference.:icon_santa: Whats important is not how much we crunch, nor how high we go, but that we all do crunch and that we do it out of our hearts and not for the status of been # 1 or in the top 5% bla bla.

As a team, we should be proud of our accomplishment, and those are that we are :

1> That we are there to help one another in solving problems.
2> That we are crunching.
3> That we are accomplishing something for mankind!
4> That we have cross borders and gone out to meet others across the fromtiers, just to chat and crunch.
5> That in our own way we have fabricated a supper computer compose of 1000+ individual from around the world and we can one day say, we were part of this.

So lets stop complaining about the numbers, the credits, the projects(and there will be more that will fail) and concentrate in just been part of this, our camaradery and our crunching. Anyway no one put a gun on our heads to crunch, we all join because we like it and we think we might accomplish something.

One thing I have to say about the credits. That shows our competetive nature and it is a way to mesure our progress, but taking that aside, lets look on our real progress.
We have united a bunch of guys and gilrs from all backgrounds and countries, and show us that no matter were we are or were we come from we can find indeviduals with similar likes and join together. All else is plain gravy. :)

[Frederic Brillouet]

Well, I have crunch numbers on and off since 2000 , lost a few account with Seti and came back last year. I been steady since and have only one preocupacion.:sad5: Will I make a difference! I like to think that I will and I'm making a difference.:icon_santa: Whats important is not how much we crunch, nor how high we go, but that we all do crunch and that we do it out of our hearts and not for the status of been # 1 or in the top 5% bla bla.

As a team, we should be proud of our accomplishment, and those are that we are :

1> That we are there to help one another in solving problems.
2> That we are crunching.
3> That we are accomplishing something for mankind!
4> That we have cross borders and gone out to meet others across the fromtiers, just to chat and crunch.
5> That in our own way we have fabricated a supper computer compose of 1000+ individual from around the world and we can one day say, we were part of this.

So lets stop complaining about the numbers, the credits, the projects(and there will be more that will fail) and concentrate in just been part of this, our camaradery and our crunching. Anyway no one put a gun on our heads to crunch, we all join because we like it and we think we might accomplish something.

One thing I have to say about the credits. That shows our competetive nature and it is a way to mesure our progress, but taking that aside, lets look on our real progress.
We have united a bunch of guys and gilrs from all backgrounds and countries, and show us that no matter were we are or were we come from we can find indeviduals with similar likes and join together. All else is plain gravy. :)
the way Dr Iggy puts it, I never thought about it that far, but its actually true. We are an international crunching community, let the governments take an example to us! (for some reason the last bit of the sentence sounds weird)

PS: Nflight, I've surpassed you in the team stats

[mitchellds]

Ok Nflight, I'm going to give SOB a couple of weeks run. Other than WCG I've always run Boinc related projects. So, I'm a Boinc'r to the core.

[Nflight]

Ok Nflight, I'm going to give SOB a couple of weeks run. Other than WCG I've always run Boinc related projects. So, I'm a Boinc'r to the core.

That's Great Mitchellds, welcome aboard! :blob3:

[Borfil]

What I mean is that after enjoying our crunching and our camaradery, our standing and points or credits is just fine and dandy because they just satisfied our personal vanity as competitors and humans. So it is nice to have a quantitive measure of our accomplishments, but our goals should be to be friends, and crunch.

[vaughan]

Updating the thread from the OP today we continue the sorry saga of BOINC Projects going "Toes Up":
The list at Boinc Synergy shows the following:-
ABC@home beta - Down
APS@home - Unreachable
BOINC Alpha - Unreachable
DepSpid - Unreachable
Enigma@home - Unreachable
ESEA@home - Unreachable
GeneticLife@home - Unreachable
MalariaControl - Unreachable
MindModeling beta - Unreachable
NQueens - Unreachable
Predictor@home - Unreachable
Project Neuron - Unreachable
PS3Grid - Unreachable
Riesel Sieve - Unreachable
SCILink - Unreachable
Seti@home - Unreachable
Seti@home beta - Unreachable
UFluids - Unreachable

and one that says its OK but actually isn't is PrimeGrid. Its just plain not there!!! :icon_twisted:

They suck you in with a big "Let's commemorate the anniversary of the Lunar Landing" challenge then their site goes "Poof" and vanishes into cyberspace. No "Sorry we're down for maintenance, be back at x". Nup, just :5censored: gone.

[sentient_life]

That listing from BOINC Synergy isn't correct. I've checked several of those projects, and they are running fine. Several of them don't have work available, but the websites are still accessible.