New BOINC Project: SciLINC

Yet another new BOINC project, it's another busy month on the BOINC project front.

Project Page: http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/
Account Creation: http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/create_account_form.php
Team Page: http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/team_....php?teamid=26

Project blurb from http://www.botanicus.org/Scilinc.aspx

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SciLINC:Scientific Literature Indexing on Networked Computers
Missouri Botanical Garden proposes Scientific Literature Indexing on Networked Computers (SciLINC), a public-resource computing application that will automatically index large amounts of digitized scientific literature, ultimately providing users with an integrated Web portal, available at www.botanicus.org, for the discovery of information about plants. Public-resource computing applications use internet-connected PCs to analyze data when the PC is not active. These applications generally run in the form of a screensaver, taking advantage of unused computer processing power to analyze vast amounts of data.
Our application, freely available to the general public, will analyze text from digitized botanical literature in order to return a full-text index and a keyword index for each page. These keywords will be annotated with links to other online resources-i.e. Web pages about a particular plant-allowing users of the portal to search for terms, discover where they reside in a body of digitized literature, view the appropriate pages, and click through to discover other online resources associated with that keyword. This Web portal will be an essential tool for anyone interested in learning about plants, including scientists, students, and the general public.

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Anyway account creation is open and i've created the team. Handover when founder joins.

I joined also but I noticed the WUs are extremely short (3 to 4 seconds ) on an Intel 3.04 GHz. The credit is also low which is .01 per WU. That will work you to death shifting gears. LOL :icon_mrgreen:

OK, I joined too but even though the Server Status page says they have >50,000 work units BOINC Manager says no work from project. :(

Thanks for the Info Evil-Dragon, I joined up too ... :)

I'm in too! :)

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Originally Posted by vaughan

OK, I joined too but even though the Server Status page says they have >50,000 work units BOINC Manager says no work from project. :(

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I'm not getting any work either. Must be a glitch.

Joined too. :) But focusing on the contest atm.

4 cores primed and ready

Thanks for the hook-up EvilDragon. That's tops.

/ed - This looks like a very worthwhile effort. Can hardly wait until the wu's start flowing on this one. I see 149 members already across 31 teams (the usual suspects, of course) - ed/

I joined too:)

I am in and attached:
Deferring communication for 1 min
Reason: no work from project!
over
and
over
again ! :sad5:

P.S. does this make it 50 projects you have now PoorBoy?

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Originally Posted by Nflight

I am in and attached:
Deferring communication for 1 min
Reason: no work from project!
over
and
over
again ! :sad5:

P.S. does this make it 50 projects you have now PoorBoy?

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Actually 53 BOINC Projects I'm Attached now, I haven't done work for all of them though, for various reasons. They haven't gave work out on some of them yet, some are just dead in the water & may actually never send any work out, some are Linux only Projects so far ...

Probably about 45 of them I've done some WU's for ... :)

I was just wondering when a project like this would come..very fun!

Carl Von Linne was Swedish and catalogue and named many..many flowers, plants and so on..

He did a tremendous work!

I hope there will be a genome comparison to see if his theorys were right..

By the way his celebrates his 300 birthday this year!

HURRAY HURRAY HURRAY!

A little bit of interesting history to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolus_Linnaeus

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In 1743-44, Linnaeus designed today's thermometer scale by reversing that invented by Anders Celsius (1701-1744)--originally 100 was the melting point of ice and 0 water’s boiling point

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I remembered something about that from school but if anyone had ever asked me who it was I would never have been able to tell them who when or why.

Thanks Bubben.

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Originally Posted by Bubben

I was just wondering when a project like this would come..very fun!

Carl Von Linne was Swedish and catalogue and named many..many flowers, plants and so on..

He did a tremendous work!

I hope there will be a genome comparison to see if his theorys were right..

By the way his celebrates his 300 birthday this year!

HURRAY HURRAY HURRAY!

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Thanks Bubben!

Linne is a foregin contryman to me and he is the "King of flowers" for us Swedes.

Lagu:icon_thumright:

Have any heard of the Swedish sailchip "Kalmar Nyckel" of Delaware as entuasiasts in USA builded from the ground after the old model. I think it was finished 2006 and is sailing carrying peoples as pay for it.

http://www.kalmarnyckel.org/

Did you know...

The original Kalmar Nyckel sailed from Sweden to the New World in 1638 leaving its passengers to establish the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley, the Colony of New Sweden in present-day Wilmington, Delaware. She made a total of four roundtrip crossings of the Atlantic—more than any other ship of the era. Her first voyage to the New World left 24 settlers of Swedish, Finnish, German and Dutch descent in the Delaware Valley. Joining them was a black freedman who sailed from the Caribbean aboard her companion ship the Fogel Grip.

Of topic!

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Originally Posted by AMDave

I remembered something about that from school but if anyone had ever asked me who it was I would never have been able to tell them who when or why.

Thanks Bubben.

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AMDave, unfortunately Linne never reached Australia. I think he though it was a U-land,:icon_lol: Seriously if he had been there he had got to see mych animals but I beleive not so very mych flowers and seed? I may be wrong but when I have watch documentary films from down under it has most been animals on the film.:icon_rolleyes:

I got some work for this today. 1 second WU's :S

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Originally Posted by Evil-Dragon

I got some work for this today. 1 second WU's :S

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I got 4 Wu's and shut off the Request for more, I don't see much point in running this Project unless you want to choke your Pc to Death with Downloads & Uploads.

From what I can see you have to Download a Ton of Files & then the Wu only runs for less than a second & then you have to Upload all those files again. Why some projects are even started is beyond me.

I have 0.02 Credits pending for the 4 Wu's and that's probably all I'll ever have until I see an improvement. The way the project is set up now all your going to be doing is taking System Resources away from the other projects that need them more than this Project does.

I was away fro several hours, upon returning I have 1300 Work Units and the bandwidth is choking my system. So you were right, until they fix this it is not worth running it!

Is it sending/recieving a WU every second or what..?

Maybe 500-1000 WU:s all at once should do the trick or..?

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Originally Posted by Nflight

I was away fro several hours, upon returning I have 1300 Work Units and the bandwidth is choking my system. So you were right, until they fix this it is not worth running it!

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My point exactly, I go through the same thing with the BOINC Alpha Project, if I try to run more than 1 Pc at the project my Network gets Choked up trying to Upload the 4 mb Files that only take 1 minute to run. So I only run 1 Pc at a time and it works okay then because the Uploads can keep up with the Downloads.

But this sciLINC Project is ridiculous, with the less than 1 sec Wu's theres no way the Uploads can keep up with the downloads ... :icon_rolleyes:

Hmm..

Maybe someone with a faster upload should do those projects..(8/8)?

(if it´s necesseary at all..)

There seems to still be problems:

SciLINC
Unable to connect to database - please try again later Error: 2002Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

They managed to corrupt their database, probably because of 1000's of WU's coming in from all angles every second.

Database corruption doesn't happen because of the number of cuncurrent connections... it comes down to how the database server locks the operation requests.
If the database is not properly configured, it can do update and delete operations to data that is being used elsewhere by some other cuncurrent connection. That causes corruption because the other connection is trying to work with data that doesn't exist anymore or was altered during that time.

Usually its not a big deal when you're on test environments, with only half a dozen people accessing the database it rarely or never happens that two people access the same data at the same time, but if you switch to a production system with hundreds or thousands of clients all accessing and altering the data it can happen that two or more try to alter the same data at the same time...

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Originally Posted by NeoGen

Database corruption doesn't happen because of the number of cuncurrent connections... it comes down to how the database server locks the operation requests.
If the database is not properly configured, it can do update and delete operations to data that is being used elsewhere by some other cuncurrent connection. That causes corruption because the other connection is trying to work with data that doesn't exist anymore or was altered during that time.

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Very true NeoGen, but alas that was not our issue either.

The database was properly configured and we had tested with dozens of clients hitting the server while it ran 20+ instances of httpd, 9 different project daemons and an equal number of periodic tasks, some lasting 8 hours. All of this generated hundreds of queries per second with peaks of a couple thousand.

We were bitten by electrical issues. Several machines in the building where the server is housed completely fell over around the time this occurred.

(Un?)fortunately the SciLINC server stayed up, but system file buffers were corrupted and garbage was written out to the drive. This spanned the Apache log files, the MySQL log files, the Linux kernel log files and unfortunately the tablespace for at least one of our tables, the SciLINC result table. :sad5:

Ouch!

We have since managed to recover everything else and put the project back up, but we are not feeding new work units nor are we registering new accounts at this point in time.

I would like to personally apologize to those that were affected by the high CPU load that resulted from transferring 2,500 small files all at the same time. And, I would also like to thank everyone that has shown an interest in SciLINC and the research that is being done.

Thank you,

Ron Parker
SciLINC Developer

Ouch... I guess that not even the best and most well tuned Database system in the world would be prepared for that. :icon_neutral:

Thankfully I got my account already, so I'll be there when the time comes for another round of workunits. :icon_mrgreen:

In the mean time, thanks for the update, and keep up the good work! Your project has an interesting purpose, outside of the common nowadays maths or bio sciences, I'm looking forward to see it developing. :)

When do you think the project will be working again?

And do you intend to have a alpha or beta version first?