We are slipping

[nickle]

I have noticed that although we have more team members, we are beginning to slip down the table. Have some already given up?

[Strongbow]

Hi Nickle,

Welcome aboard! :D

It does look like that doesn't it! ...the BBC Climate Change experiment is an extraordinary BOINC project simply because the tasks are so extensive and take months of compute per client. Obviously this does put some people off as does when they crunch for many weeks and their task crashes, which seems to have happened to most users (me included on 1 task), so BOINC requests a new one and they have to start from scratch again. So I think some users get a bit demoralised by this and just abort!

I should be getting a new PC soon (Intel dual core - sorry guys no choice as it is a quick order under the Home Computing Initiative scheme which the UK Gov are about to stop!) so I will get that thing crunching away although I'm sure it won't make much of a dent against the teams above us!

One of my tasks reached the 80's today so just 1090hrs to go till completion but after that I won't be accepting anymore tasks for that core from this project. This is simply because the project is not that practical for my home systems as I like to tinker around with operating systems now and again so a lengthy project like this one does restrict me slightly!

[drezha]

Even the normal ones can be a bit long. :?

The one on my Duron has taken 100+ hours and still needs 2000+ hours :shock: (admittly it's only 2% done and already has 445 credit for that one CPU )

[Empty_5oul]

there is a similar project: http://attribution.cpdn.org/index.php

it does the same thing but for a much lower timescale and at a higher resolution. It needs powerful machines to run it:

* CPU: Pentium 4, 2.4GHz (or equivalent, or higher!) is the minimum CPU suggested to complete a single simulation in under 4 weeks if run continuously. Slower processors will take longer.
* RAM: 1GB of RAM is suggested, as the simulation takes up typically between 150-450MB of memory.
* Disk space: 500MB of hard disk space should suffice.
* Supported platforms: Windows XP/2000/NT and Linux.

maybe this would suit a few of you more?

[NeoGen]

And you guys are forgetting that the BBC application has *plenty* of problems and incompatibilities that make it crash, thus making people lose their models, which leaves people quite annoyed (to say the least).

For a month or so that I've voluntarely been over at the project's Q&A answering questions to people, and you wouldn't believe the amount of people that every day complains that their models have crashed/reset/back to 1920's/etc...

The application has been improved a few weeks ago (new version launched), and the effects on the Q&A were noticeable, the posts there dropped to about half I'd say, but still there's plenty of people angry at the project and quitting every day because of the instability.

[nickle]

I guess I have been lucky (still) my job is chugging along nicely, I'm at 1943 and no crash yet. it would be nice if we could get going again... even if it takes a long time...

[NeoGen]

Nickle, your model is at a date where about 75% of all others have already crashed. From what I learned with my Q&A assistence experiment, be very careful with the following:

- Don't let boinc make benchmarks while BBC is running. (That also means don't upgrade to newer boinc versions, it triggers the benchmark routine)
- Don't let your anti-virus scan away at the boinc folder while BBC is running (If possible, exclude the boinc folder from anti-virus scanning)
- Don't do disk defrags while BBC is running. (Tends to cause crashes...)
- If you watch the graphics/screensaver, make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date. (older graphics drivers with openGL incompatibilities can cause crashes)
- Try not to let a power surge, blue screen, or any other unexpected system shutdown happen. (I've seen many times people saying that after a windows crash, and the machine rebooted, boinc reported the model as crashed too)

I guess us hardcore PC users have an almost complete control of all these factors on our machines, but the great majority of people out there don't know as much as we do, and get disappointed when the application crashes and they don't know why... :roll:

[nickle]

Thanks for the tips... and ... I keep my fingers crossed