AMD Users Race! - Finished!

[NeoGen]

Hello everyone to yet another AMD Users Race!
Yes, it's me, the organizer of the past 3 races, here to tell you that we're setting up a 4th race, and it will be this month!

But this time, we need YOU to come and pick the project to race on! Wait! I'm way too ahead already! Let me start from the beginning again...

The forums were lacking activity and people were feeling bored of the same routine, so a few of us thought up and organized a plan for a Race!
The idea is simple...
- 1 week (7 days) of race per month. (that way you can participate just that week and run your favorite projects on the other 3 weeks)
- 1 single project to race on each month
- Project is chosen by public poll
- Race takes place on the last week of the month
- Race starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday (weekends are better for people to have free time to get everything ready)
- And of course... there will be stats!!


Preliminary Calendar (of first race):
October 7 -> 14 - Poll to determine project
October 14 -> 21 - Race preparations and background work (mostly me creating the stats and maybe other routine stuff)
October 21 -> 27 - RACE!!! Full 7 days


Well, I think the main ideas are explained, head on to the first poll thread and help decide in what project will be this month's race!
October Race - http://amdusers.com/forum/showthread...2371#post52371


STATS - http://neogen.amdusers.com/contest2007/raceoct.htm

[NeoGen]

The first stage is complete. We have a poll winner, World Community Grid.

In October 21st, 00:00 GMT+1 (it's my timezone), the race will begin, and it will be ended at October 28th, 00:00 (GMT+1 as well)

There is one full week until then, which should hopefully be enough time for everyone to get ready for the race.

[LeBo]

A question about WCG. Does the client throttle the CPU down ? On one of my quads the cpus are running at 7-18 % instead of 25% each....

[gamer007]

Ah, another race? I'm in. I'll just pause my long ClimatePrediction WU.

Sorry about being quite for quite some time. Haven't been feeling good and didn't really feel like doing much.

[BlackAdder]

Is WCG gonna be Boinc or their UD client ??

[NeoGen]

Ah, another race? I'm in. I'll just pause my long ClimatePrediction WU.

Sorry about being quite for quite some time. Haven't been feeling good and didn't really feel like doing much.

Problems with girls, right?

Is WCG gonna be Boinc or their UD client ??

Boinc client.
WCG is changing all their projects to boinc, and phasing out the non-boinc client.

[Brucifer]

A couple comments from one of the older farts here. Please take them as constructive as that's the light they are offered in.

I believe that Neo's effort is headed in the right direction and that the one week out of four is a very good approach. My comments run around the term "race" and also deal with the boinc/non-boinc world. Everyone here doesn't have a herd of computers, and so there really isn't a true"race" as the moment certain members enter, it is a foregone conclusion who is going to win. I remember back to one of the races where there were two categories, farmers and single-home crunchers, or something like that. However a race is basically a divisive thing as there's a winner and then the losers. I think that instead of a race, it should be more in the form of a concerted effort type of thing to advance the overall team's standing in various projects against other teams. That way the goal is the advancement of the team rather than doing a personal level kind of thing, and all the participants can feel good at having contributed towards the common goal. Like what DPC does with their stampede's for instance, and other teams have other names for it.

The second item is that I think there should be two efforts. One directed at boinc and the other at non-boinc. We do have some people here (myself included) that just are not set up for boinc or running windows. There are two team perspective competitions, one is Bok's, and the other is DC-Vault. Overall team placement in these efforts is impacted by team member participation in both boinc/non-boinc projects.

There are more boinc crunchers here than non-boinc crunchers, so one doesn't have to be the brightest light in the room to figure out that boinc projects are going to win the greatest majority of the time. Just because the boinc project wins the vote doesn't automatically guarantee that everyone will crunch boinc... the non-boinc crowd is left out. Not intentionally I know, but the net effect is that the team is in reality a "boinc" team rather than an all-encompassing DC-projects type team.

So I believe that running two projects (boinc/non-boinc) for a week each month get more members participating. We would be encouraging everyone to participate for a week each month and that maybe we could pick up more participants that do not have many assets. There's more to this game than just the farms. And again, these are just some thoughts offered in trying to improve overall team participation so that everyone feels they are really helping the team.

[Lagu]

You can choose run WCG trough Boinc or download United Devices agent. I have it and it is really nice. You can choose how much recourses the agent will use but only if you run their own agent I think. There is a tool called WCG CPU Trottle Control as you can download.

The tool allow you set how much power you want your computer will have running WCG. I have set it to 80% on my AMD64 because eventually overheating. It is simple to use. Move the slid where you want then OK and the tool disappear.

Little about United Devices Agent:

• Shows Primary task information
• Chows Total Points
• Chows Total Run Time
• Chows Task Runtime
• Chows Task Execution Progress
• Overall Performance (Benchmark)

Processor
Memory
Storage
Network

• Application button
• Preference button
• Snooze button
• Help Button
• Minimize button

And much more.

This agent is good if you want to run it on a single core.

How do I get my Windows grid agent to use 100% of the available CPU?

When running the grid agent for Windows you will now see that 100% of the CPU is not used by default. We have introduced a default setting of 60%. If the agent sees the overall system CPU usage go above this value, it backs off (with some exceptions) to try to not add to the CPU usage. Thus, if some other applications are using more than the specified percentage of CPU utilization, the grid work will almost completely stop. The agent runs at the absolutely lowest CPU priority, so it instantaneously gives up the CPU to anything else needing it in the machine, except for any other process also running at the lowest priority, with which it would split the remaining CPU time. There are usually very few if any other processes running at the lowest priority.
However, we have found that some recently designed machines deal with the slight increase in CPU temperature from running at higher utilization percentages, by slowing the system clock rather than speeding up the cooling fan as needed. This could cause everything to run slower on such a machine. To keep this from happening, we decided to reduce the grid agent's default CPU throttle setting to around 60% so that the CPU does not heat up much. If you wish to change the CPU utilization setting, we provide a downloadable tool to do this. This throttle feature is not yet available for the Boinc based agents. We felt that our grid has grown sufficiently that we can afford to do this and be even less obtrusive to our member's machines. But, if your machine is able to run at 100% CPU utilization, we certainly welcome the additional contribution that brings to our projects.
The tool can be downloaded from here. (Ctrl-click) For those who want to check the md5sum to be certain it was downloaded correctly, the md5sum value is be682ba3260490f20fe5eb5672ff6909. After downloading the tool, run it, set the slider to the desired percentage and click OK. If you used our prior method of setting the throttle, that value will be used until the tool is used to set a new value. Additional detailed help, exceptions and technical information is available using the tool's Help button. We hope it is fairly obvious how to use the tool. Feel free to let us know about any problems or suggestions. Thank you.

I´m running WCG right now using UD-Grid and the project is PROTEOME_FOLDING_2 (Human Proteome Folding Phase 2.)

It is possible they will phase out their WU’s to Boinc but their agent works today and receive works.

[Lagu]

Am is not a member of the "Race". I´m a member of the FUN. If I lose who care. All can´t be a winner and this competition or "Boost" is for our members as like it. It is mor important participate than win.

My 2 cents

[Bender10]

I do agree that something about this activity was giving me an itchy feeling on the back of my head (hence the scratching....), And it might have been the term 'race'. This 'activity' is more like a 'boost', 'push', 'helpful crunching', 'scramble'???

Maybe we can start another poll to come up with a name for this 'activity'.....

The idea to give our members something to look forward to, and provide some help to our 'needy' projects sounds great. And the 'activity' is a great start. Let's see...run something every month that will involve as many members as possible (boinc, non-boinc), yet still help out some needy projects, cool.

I think NeoGen's idea is a good start. With support, and ideas from everyone, this will turn into something fun (and productive).

This 'activity' is still in it's infancy. I'm sure there is a good chance a dual boinc/non-boinc monthly 'activity' will become normal.