Team Catching up Update

[gatekeeper53]

Yeah, what happened to BigZ? We need that output.

Also, I got PS working from a USB ram stick. Crunching on it now (on the firewalled system at work). Darn Intel P4 dual core wannabe is s-l-o-w...

Thinking on this project last night, and being the paranoid fella that I am, I came up with a concern. As the WU's are limited in number, what's to stop a team from mass downloading at the end to gobble up all the remaining work units and prevent another team from competing?

As for the ethics of hording all the wu"s I talked to Just, who is the project owner, this morning and was told that they are watching for this and no matter the team that tries it the entire team will be axed. I knew when Steve said that it would be trouble. They are already discussing it over in the BB forum. Just has started to put a 2 day expiration of wu.s back in to prevent all of us from doing things we wouldn't do except in the heat of compeation.

[Steve Lux]

2 days? ACK! Last night I put 50 WUs on this stick and a lot of WU's on my home system (75 I think). Neither will be done in 2 days. I was just trying to ensure that I had a few days worth in case of problems.

What do I do with the left over WU's?

[Bender10]

Geez, Unless you have a screamin' dual core or 2, I'd just do the best you can.

Then write 1000 times on the blackboard "I will not Bogart WU's"......

[Ototero]

At the current rates of both teams, we can hold on for 24 days. And we still have a few big hitters still to join the party

[Steve Lux]

Is there a trick to getting Pi on a stick? Twisted minds would like to know...

Heh. Actually it's easier than Pie. You simply have to have only one session of the PS GUI running at a time. The problem I was having was that the stick session wouldn't run while the active session was running.

So, if you shut down the active session, load up the stick session, log into your user account, download work units, log off from the PS stick session and start your system session back up. Plug your stick into your firewalled (work) computer and start up the GUI. It will crunch on the other machine.

Unless there is some major glitch I should be able to simply bring the stick back home, shut down the PS session that is running, plug the stick session back in and start it up. It should be able to upload the completed WUs and download new ones for the stick.

I think one of the reasons my WU's are going as slow as they are is because I still have D2OL running the remaining 800 WU's (a week's worth) on my work computer. PS seems to have a lower priority. But I have D2OL set to not download any more work units, so eventually PS will speed up.

[Bender10]

I wish it was that easy to run off some of these Nano wu's I still have. As of late, they have been running long. When I get home tonight, I hope most of them are gone. Checking the site, most are still crunching....

I have a couple in the boxes that were up to 29-30 hours this morning.

[mitchellds]

Hey can somebody explain to me how the credit system works in relation to the score on this project? Looking at our team members credit, I see lotsa members with 2000 credit, but all with different scores of course.

Is it somehow related to how much credit you have for downloading new work with maybe 2000 being the max?

[vaughan]

You score 1 point per Pi task completed. These take about 1 hour each on a 3GHz PC. To stop people d/l too many tasks and maybe abandoning them, JUST, the project author / admin created the 20,000 limit. Each d/l task uses up 100 of these 20,000 credits. This means a user is initially limited to d/l'ing no more than 200 tasks. However, each PC has a limit of 100 tasks. So you would max out if you started with 2 PCs and let them both download 100 tasks. As you return finished work you are credited with 300 credits units. This then allows you to d/l 3 more tasks. and so on. The SCORE is the important number as it shows your comparison to other members. The CREDIT system is like an artifical currency to stop over zealous downloading.

At one time there was a penalty for returning time-expired tasks. You earned 1 point for the SCORE, but only received 100 for your credits. This was to encourage timely return of work. If you want to stop running you just put a check mark tick in the box on the User tab of the GUI that says "Do not download new Work Unit"

Occasionally, JUST will allocated bonus score points. The most recent was a reward of a point to every participant contributing work on Chinese New Year. Another time was on 1.1.2007. He does this as a friendly reward to his volunteer participants. You may have also noticed that in the Individual members score pages of the official stats that some names are in red, the others in black text. The red ones are "honorable project testers". These people contributed results during the various test phases of the project when JUST was ironing out early bugs in the software. They are also entitled to have "honorable project testers" included in their personal stats signature for use in forums like ours.

[mitchellds]

ah, interesting , thanks for the explanation.

[temna]

nmm, in ten days of crunching, I crack the top 40.. Maybe the wife is right.. Maybe I DO have too many computers.. Still.. There HAS to be room for a few more.. hmm.. Can you install Windows on an AS/400?