February Competitions

[Dirk Broer]

Hello everyone! Welcome to another month of competitions!:icon_wink:

Forgive the delay, but NeoGen's free time has been shrunk to below the minimum, or sometimes none at all, since he started working on his new job in the begining of somewhere last year.
Moving on, here's what we got for the month of February...

February 1 to February 8 - Winter Protein Race
Organised by Russia Team, this challenge will be for Rosetta@Home.
As the Ruskies are in a different time zone (Moskow is at GMT +3, afaik) the challenge will begin on 2012-02-01 at 04:00 GMT and end 2012-02-08 04:00 GMT, at least....that's what on the site for now. I personally would not be surprised when they actually begin 2012-01-31 20:00 GMT (4 hours time difference to the other way). At the moment we're not participating yet, but we have more than 20 active members on this project (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=rah&team=19).

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=180


February 6 to February 13 - The newest grid chalenge in 2012
Organised by IBM Hungary, this challenge is for World Community Grid. And yes, they forgot a 'l' in challenge, I did not.
This is another chance for a good result after our 4th place at Australia Day end date (http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=176). They might want to think about a new color for Jason's badges at the end if he keeps up his pace, but he is not the only one that's active at this project, I counted more than 35 active members (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=bwcg&team=731). At the moment we not yet participate.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=181

[NeoGen]

Props to you Sir for a very well presented contests thread! :)
And you are correct, I have had barely enough time to drop by and (try to) keep up with what is going on in the AMD Universe. But I trust you and our fellow AMD Users will be able to fill in for me until I finish reorganizing my priorities and securing my job post, which is very important in these dark ages of economy worldwide.

But moving on to good news, I have been making some savings for a while, so hopefully this quarter I will be investing on another AMD cruncher, whose main function will be my personal database and source code server appliance, for my own little programming experiments. Of course that will not even use 1% of the system resources, but I plan on keeping it *very* busy crunching day and night! :)
But more to come on that soon on a future thread, as I am still finalizing the budget estimates and the list of parts I want to get!

[vaughan]

AMD Users has now signed up for both these challenges.

[Dirk Broer]

Props to you Sir for a very well presented contests thread! :)

Thanks Neo, I made it after a good example!:icon_wink:
Pity I can't place it where it should be, but perhaps you can get it there

[Nflight]

I would like to participate if I can muster the time allowance window. My life has been very busy lately and I really need to stay on point with my personal life as much as I can. AMDusers crunching will always be part of me even though you might not hear from me for days or even weeks on end. Crunch on Ladies and Gentlemen!

[Dirk Broer]

AMD Users has now signed up for both these challenges.

Thanks Vaughan, I'll keep an eye out for future challenges as well.

[NeoGen]

I would like to participate if I can muster the time allowance window. My life has been very busy lately and I really need to stay on point with my personal life as much as I can. AMDusers crunching will always be part of me even though you might not hear from me for days or even weeks on end. Crunch on Ladies and Gentlemen!
You and me both Nflight... :)

[Dirk Broer]

Thanks Vaughan, I'll keep an eye out for future challenges as well.

Hello everyone! Version 2.0 of the February competitions!:icon_wink:
Here's what we got now for the month of February...

February 1 to February 8 - SIMAP February 2012 Scramble
Organised as usual by BOINCStats, this challenge will be the monthly Simap@Home challenge.
At the moment we're not participating yet, but we have at least 14 active members on this project (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=sim&team=48), the team's #5, Björn Johansson, being the most active at the moment.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=183


February 1 to February 8 - Winter Protein Race
Organised by Russia Team, this challenge will be for Rosetta@Home.
As the Ruskies are in a different time zone (Moskow is at GMT +3, afaik) the challenge will begin on 2012-02-01 at 04:00 GMT and end 2012-02-08 04:00 GMT, at least....that's what on the site for now. I personally would not be surprised when they actually begin 2012-01-31 20:00 GMT (4 hours time difference to the other way). At the moment we're not participating yet, but we have more than 20 active members on this project (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=rah&team=19).

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=180


February 6 to February 13 - The newest grid chalenge in 2012
Organised by IBM Hungary, this challenge is for World Community Grid. And yes, they forgot a 'l' in challenge, I did not.
This is another chance for a good result after our 4th place at Australia Day end date (http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=176). They might want to think about a new color for Jason's badges at the end if he keeps up his pace, but he is not the only one that's active at this project, I counted more than 35 active members (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=bwcg&team=731).

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=181


February 10 to February 17 - On a way to a Latin square
Organised by Crystal Dream, this is a challenge for SAT@Home. We have only 7 members who were ever active, and 3 who were in the last 7 days (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=pds&team=6). Perhaps your best chance ever to end up in the team top-10 for this project. Our most active member at the moment is sentient_life, but lazykiller has the most recent results. At the moment we do not yet participate.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=184

On a personal level you can enjoy PrimeGrid's Tour de Prime (http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=3977&nowrap=true#47666) this month

[NeoGen]

Cool.. you just showed me to a project I didn't know yet, SAT@Home.:icon_wink:

AMDave, you are the founder of the Team at SAT@Home... please enable member joining. I just created my account and was going to join but our team does not have a "Join this Team" link.

[AMDave]

It is enabled.
6 others have joined already.
Did you log into your account first?

Others have had the same problem joining their teams (per Message Board posts)

Try again with these work-around steps:
1 - log in to your account page first.
2 - Then open a new tab and paste in this URL "http://sat.isa.ru/pdsat/team_join_form.php?id=6"
3 - click the Join Team button

That should complete it for you.
Oleg was under the perception that he had fixed this problem in Oct/Nov last year.

[NeoGen]

I joined through that link, and have now downloaded my first WU, so that all credits count for the Team. :)

I created the account and logged in, and did a teams search and found our Team among others. I noticed that some other teams (possibly not all) had the "Join this Team" link visible but ours for some reason didn't. I've seen this happen in a number of other new projects, it seems it's a default setting of some sort that is turned off or not working well upon team creation. Not sure exactly about the fix though, but some teams can have the link up and visible.
Maybe after creating a team, we have to set it to not allow members joining, save, and then set it to allow members joining and save again? To do a settings refresh of sorts... who knows?


EDIT: Is there anyone else that has not joined yet, that could join the project and double check after me? I am already on the Team, so I am not able to see the link now even if it was fixed.

[Dirk Broer]

Was able to join without any problem. There was a line "Join this team" that I had to click twice and I was in.
Howdee! The first WU is already running....

[NeoGen]

Thanks Neo, I made it after a good example!:icon_wink:
Pity I can't place it where it should be, but perhaps you can get it there
Couldn't find an easy way to turn it into an Article, but I moved it to the Members Lounge so this way more people can join in on the fun. :)

[Dirk Broer]

Hi NeoGen,

It is just that our homepage still shows the October Competitions of last year.
I can't make an active page that will replace that with the February ones.

[Dirk Broer]

Simap has now started, but there are no WUs yet (http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=183), lol
Rosetta is, as the Russians promised, some 4 hours from now. Who lives in GMT -4?
I bet their CPUs are already glowing dark red from the moment it was 00:00:00 in Russia, a country with more time zones than I have active cores.

[NeoGen]

Hi NeoGen,

It is just that our homepage still shows the October Competitions of last year.
I can't make an active page that will replace that with the February ones.
Yes, I that's what I was talking about, I believe it's called an Article. It's a special kind of post that does not land on any specific forums, it has it's own little place somewhere in the databases.
After created has to be approved and published by an administrator and then it will show up in that top section.
Last night I was hoping to find some shortcut to turn your post into article but there wasn't one anywhere to be found. Since no one gave it a try yet I think I'll create an article from scratch, do some good old copy-pasting work with your post and hope one of the Admins sees it and gets it up in the articles section. :)

[AMDave]

Promoted to Article. Thanks Dirk!

[Dirk Broer]

Thanks AMDave!

[Dirk Broer]

Version 3.0:

Hello everyone! Version 2.0 of the February competitions!:icon_wink:
Here's what we got now for the month of February...

February 1 to February 8 - SIMAP February 2012 Scramble
Organised as usual by BOINCStats, this challenge will be the monthly Simap@Home challenge.
We have at least 14 active members on this project (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=sim&team=48), the team's #5, Björn Johansson, being the most active at the moment.

http://boincstats.com/signature/team_48_challenges183.gif
We joined later and despite the WUs ran out at the end of the challenge managed a 12nd place out of 21.
Björn Johansson was our best memeber at #184.

February 1 to February 8 - Winter Protein Race
Organised by Russia Team, this challenge will be for Rosetta@Home.
As the Ruskies are in a different time zone (Moskow is at GMT +3, afaik) the challenge will begin on 2012-02-01 at 04:00 GMT and end 2012-02-08 04:00 GMT, at least....that's what on the site for now. I personally would not be surprised when they actually begin 2012-01-31 20:00 GMT (4 hours time difference to the other way). We have more than 20 active members on this project (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=rah&team=19).

http://boincstats.com/signature/team_19_challenges180.gif
We managed a 7th place out of 32 and Titus, our most active member for this project at the moment, even managed a 10th place out of 1369.

February 6 to February 13 - The newest grid chalenge in 2012
Organised by IBM Hungary, this challenge is for World Community Grid. And yes, they forgot a 'l' in challenge, I did not.
This is another chance for a good result after our 4th place at Australia Day end date (http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=176). They might want to think about a new color for Jason's badges at the end if he keeps up his pace, but he is not the only one that's active at this project, I counted more than 35 active members (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=bwcg&team=731).

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=181
http://boincstats.com/signature/team_731_challenges181.gif
We're at #3 out of 24 teams now, with Jason as our best member at #1 out of 1460 participants


February 10 to February 17 - On a way to a Latin square
Organised by Crystal Dream, this is a challenge for SAT@Home. We have only 7 members who were ever active, and 3 who were in the last 7 days (http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=team&proj=pds&team=6). Perhaps your best chance ever to end up in the team top-10 for this project. Our most active member at the moment is sentient_life, but lazykiller has the most recent results.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=184


February 17 to February 24 - SLinCA@Home aceleración
Organized by Colombia, this is a challenge for SLinCA@Home. We are already entered!

http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=185


February 21 to February 28 - SETI@Home Quarterly Challenge
A Seti@Home challenge, organised by SETI.USA. Didn't it all start with Seti@Home? For me it did.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challenges.php?action=details&chid=189


On a personal level you can enjoy PrimeGrid's Tour de Prime (http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=3977&nowrap=true#47666) this month

[Dirk Broer]

Are there competitions in March? Sure. As a matter of fact there is one challenge, issued very late, that began in late February and continues into March. Needless to say we did not enter, as we were already busy with other challenges, and did quite well with good-old-Seti! What can we do this time?

March 1 to March 7 - Divide & Conquer
BOINC@POLAND has organised a Mersenne@home challenge. We are already entered, and from the 15 members with scores on this project (http://boincstats.com/stats/user_stats.php?pr=mersenne&st=0&to=100&or=&ti=65) six can be counted as regulars, with Vaughan and B Johansson as the ones with the highest total scores.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=187


March 1 to March 8 - SIMAP March Madness
SETI.USA has planned a Simap challenge in this time frame, but as there were no WUs yet they tried to alter the dates. Then the WUs arrived early....
For now we await the new time frame. We have 133 members with a score on Simap (http://boincstats.com/stats/user_stats.php?pr=simap&st=0&to=100&or=&ti=48), and some 20 of them can be counted as active. Fortunately late entries are allowed.
Can you run Mersenne and Simap simultaniously? Well, apart from the fact that they are both CPU projects, why not?
Mersenne is very much optimized for each recent CPU family, while Simap might even run on me olde K6III-400 (http://boincsimap.org/boincsimap/appdownloads.php) and other old beasties I collected.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=192


March 20 to March 27 - The March Equinox Challenge
Frome the name of the challenge you'd think it to be PrimeGrid, but no: Correlizer (http://svahesrv2.bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de/correlizer/).
We have 12 members with a score, and only four of them are active (http://boincstats.com/stats/user_stats.php?pr=correlizer&st=0&to=100&or=&ti=4).
As yet we do not participate, so perhaps a great chance to end up in the team top-10 for this project, or just to reach the magic 10k barrier.

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=190

[NeoGen]

I already started running on Mersenne, threw all my current 14 cores at it! Let's stomp BOINC@POLAND! :)

[AMDave]

published. Thanks for the 'heads up' Dirk.
Added a few to Mersenne myself just now.
13 hours to the start.
PLENTY of time for everyone to jump in so we can make a fist of this.
http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=187

[Dirk Broer]

Thanks for promoting it to an article AMDave!
I've some real long eXtreme trial division test WUs crunching, should be ready when the challenge starts.

[AMDave]

If you are reading this, please join in on the Mersenne race today.
We are currently running 6th.

I'm All-in now. First time I've been 'All-in' on one project for about a year.
I suspect it was this project around this time last year when I surprise attacked Vaughan and held Team Rank #1 for a couple of hours. :icon_twisted:
1 (x6) box has to switch back to another project on 6th otherwise the cached WUs will expire. But I'm all good 'til then. :)

[AMDave]

I forgot how much pending credit you can build up on mersenne.
I'm up to 60K already. I hope some of it gets validated soon.
How about you, NeoGen? You are pulling some good numbers too.

[NeoGen]

Yup, I threw all I had at home to Mersenne plus my intel i5 machine at work. Never had this many cores to throw at a project at one time! :icon_mrgreen:
I broke 100K already and still going strong, and just like you I got about 40K on pending credits.
We are 1 day away from challenge end, and have established a solid 5th place on it. Not bad considering some of the teams we were fighting against!

So, after this what project are we going to stomp next? :)

EDIT: Just saw on the previous page, Correlizer challenge by the end of the month? How about we shoot to break the Team's first Million credits on it? :)

[NeoGen]

We are also signed up for "The March Milky Way" challenge (http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=194), starting on the 9th. I don't have GPUs capable of running that but anyone that can please join in and push for our Team. :)

[Dirk Broer]

You only need a OpenCL capable GPU, a HD 4650 is enough.
Errr.....and it needs to support Double Precision, so make that a HD 4730/50/70 as minimum.
And from the poison-green camp: A GT 430 as minimum, budget-wise.

[NeoGen]

Yea... my good old GeForce 9600 will definitely not cut it for milkyway. And throwing CPU cores at it does little to no dent, so I'll sit this one on the bench and watch the pros play. :)

[Dirk Broer]

Better use it for Seti or Einstein (like I do with my GT 9500)!
A GT 430 though will work, and consume as little power ~49 Watt (and less than a GT 9600 ~98Watt)
A GT 440 will work slightly better, but uses ~65Watt

A GT 520 will even work at ~29Watt, but will hardly perform (DP only 19 GFlop, GT 430 does 34 GFlop, GT 440 39 GFlop)

[NeoGen]

Is anyone else having difficulty getting Correlizer Workunits?

I'm trying to build up a cache in preparation for the challenge in 5 days, but I'm having a hard time getting any work at all.

[Dirk Broer]

I hope that they are able to supply a challenge with work,
most of the times when I check the server status there is
between 1 and 3 jobs waiting to be sent......
Fortunately there is also a Moo! challenge almost right alongside, and we're in!

[NeoGen]

Crystal Pellet, member of team BOINCstats
A quick and 'not dirty' voting round among the BOINCstats members has led to an outcome: Docking@Home will be the project for this Team Challenge. Good luck everyone!

Correlizer Challenge project has been changed.
All crunchers report to Docking@Home! 1 Day and 5 hours to start!
Let's go AMD Users!!

[Dirk Broer]

I have signed on to Docking and had already changed the Challenge article.
3 WUs running now, on 3 machines, one on a Win7 and two on two Win8 machines
Since I can't disable screensavers in Win8, I noticed a nice one for Docking!

[NeoGen]

I didn't see the article change, I just got caught by surprise when I looked up the challenge page on boincstats and saw the announcement of the project change.
I hope everyone switches on time, I'm sure more people besides me may be unaware of the change. I hope my big bright letters catch people's attention. :)

I got 2 machines already running on it and I will get a 3rd one tomorrow, or in about 13 hours from now, which should still be before the challenge start.
Let's go AMD Users!!! :)

[Dirk Broer]

The Correlizer admin is among the more silent types, does not respond to whatever.
I hope Docking will provide us with enough work for the challenge, but the machines
I have signed on are all provided at the moment.

[NeoGen]

I hope Docking will provide us with enough work for the challenge, but the machines
I have signed on are all provided at the moment.
I think Docking must be having difficulties coping with the surge of users sucking work off their servers... I have one machine that only managed to download 1 WU. :(
Upon looking at the server status page... 19 unsent results only.

[Nflight]

I joined on to Docking and am getting ample work units, maybe they upped there supply after noticing so many people surging to their project!

[NeoGen]

Not sure what is going on in the challenge, but I'm not even sure if we are participating in it... there is no teams listing, and if you look into the users list none appears from AMD Users... I can't speak for everyone else, but I know for sure that I got credit in already. :(

[Dirk Broer]

http://boincstats.com/stats/user_stats.php?pr=docking&st=0&hosts=0&ti=20&co=&date=&or=12

[NeoGen]

Well... I have no clue on how this challenge is going for us, but I'm guessing we are somewhere in the middle of the table.
I hit 100K, it's 2 days to finish, and I'm unimpressed with this challenge so I'm finishing the docking WUs I got and start caching for something else.

We are signed up for Collatz and SIMAP to start in about a week. Let's get the engines running for those two. :)

[Dirk Broer]

As soon as Moo! finishes (a little less than 12 hours from now) I'll feed my GPUs hungry transistors Collatz, that's for sure.
Actually we're -I mean you NeoGen- doing quite well in Docking, but the lack of presentable stats make this challenge a bit of a bummer

Last standings (teams with (+) normally not found in present Docking challenge stats):

Sicituradastra. 1783579
BOINCstats 1621879
SETI.USA 816285
Crystal Dream(+) 391505
L'Alliance Francophone(+) 353142
BOINC@Poland(+) 322264
AMD Users(+) 119388
TitanesDC 47112
The Knights Who Say Ni! 35653
The Scottish Boinc Team(+) 29644
United States of Earth 18932
SwissTeam.NET 13590
SETI@klamm.de 2251

[Dirk Broer]

Todays stats:


Sicituradastra. 2137421


BOINCstats 1909210


SETI.USA 1000493


Crystal Dream(+) 462702


L'Alliance Francophone(+) 411226


BOINC@Poland(+) 379727


AMD Users(+) 128563


TitanesDC 48009


The Knights Who Say Ni! 40353


The Scottish Boinc Team(+) 32796


United States of Earth 20419


SwissTeam.NET 14899


SETI@klamm.de 2848

[AMDave]

Thanks Dirk.
I saw the contest participant stat this morning before it disappeared, so I know that Bender10 came first in our team beating me by about 110K, so Congrats to Bender10.
(He'll probably think that's a hoot because he's running on set-and-forget while away at work.)
Individually he & I were somewhere in the low 20's I think.
There were some heavy guns out front.

Thanks to Steve Z., Valdis, B Johansson, Gipper, Dirk Broer, lazykiller and vaughan for their efforts. And if my eyes don't deceive me, The Old Sourdough registered us a few points.

[Bender10]

Crunching is a Hoot! Yes AMDave, the boxes have been on auto pilot more than not so far.

And it's fun to crunch on the same project together for these little 'sprint' type races. Nice going everyone!!!

I did just happen to be camped out on Moo before the challenge...but everyone has their pet project.