The Rothberg Institute

[Bender10]

It's time again for the annual 'Dust off your Node' speech.

Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL)™ and Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC)

Everyone has their pet projects. I guess these must be a couple of mine. I mainly run these projects on some friends 'Borged' machines and some non-internet boxes in various back rooms and dark alleys... The points come slow (1 per wu), and the wu size varies, but the (new) client and the wu server are very dependable (as of late). And with enough 'extra' wu's, you can survive most weekend problems on the server end. And I haven't seen any problems in 6 months or so.

I also started (again) running a thumbdrive on my dual core at werk. I don't even know it's there as my desktop work is mainly email and word processing mostly. I usually do a dump on fridays, so it is 'recharged' for the weekend. And don't forget, you can copy the 'installed' TSC/D2OL software from thumbdrive to thumbdrive (make sure there are no wu's on the drive...). Just copy the folder it was installed into. This saves on doing an install. And you can run as many thumbdrives as you want, all with the same 'node' number.

I have found a few willing friends that will run the project for a short time, and then interest will fade and they (or somebody) will disable the client (or worse ), and their output will drop off the radar. This usually takes around 1 - 3 months. I don't know that I have yet to 'Turn' one of my friends to the 'Darkside' (I keep hoping).

The new version 3.0 of the client is running very well. You now have the ability to utilize as many or as few cores as you want. You can use 1 core from an X2, or 3 cores from an X4 etc.. (all from only 1 installation of the client software), just by selecting the number of cores you want to use from inside the client. And you can increase or decrease the number of cores used whenever you want (finish the wu's on the core you want to shutdown first).

The system of wu caching has changed somewhat. The wu's are now only 'good' for 30 days after you download them. If they are returned completed after that, they are still valid, but you will not get any credit for them (so I understand). So be aware of trying to 'Hoard' a bunch of wu's on the drive.....

These are great projects for a lonely single core computer, or a snazzy HTPC. Just set it up. Run it for a day to find out how many wu's it will crunch. Triple that number and let 'er rip.



TSC - http://www.childhooddiseases.org/

D2OL - http://www.d2ol.com

[Brucifer]

They are both suffering that terminal illness... no boinc clients. As a result around here hardly anyone will touch them or anything else that isn't running under the boinc umbrella. It's too bad as they are both good projects for helping humanity. Sad to say though, this has pretty much turned into a boinc only team.. Not trying to start any war here, just a basic observation of reality.

[vaughan]

I was strongly anti-BOINC when it first started as it was riddled with problems. However, it has improved and mellowed with age and is now the predominant Distributed Computing platform.

TRI and its precursor Sengent left a sour taste in my mouth after the D2OL and TSC stats debacle a while back.

On the other hand, the BOINC projects have had their disasters too eg. Predictor and its abuse of the Volunteers who dared to question the management of the project; Tanpaku and Cosmology whose servers appear to have gone AWOL; and of course there's MilkyWay that allowed one very smart cookie access to the source code, who then improved the crunching speed of the algorithm and then refused to share their handiwork with any other participant; last but not least was my favourite - BOINC RieselSieve - that evaporated into oblivion overnight along with several sticks of RAM I donated to the cause.

Oh well, as Fred would say: C'est la vie

If you want to try a newish non-BOINC project you could join me at Wieferich @ Home and try to hold off the Arsian onslaught that approaches like the wind.

[Frederic Brillouet]

I would gladly help, if it weren't that I am giving my all on dpad to get us some speed again there. no big n umbers as it used to be though. will throw some out today maybe

[Brucifer]

If you want to try a newish non-BOINC project you could join me at Wieferich @ Home and try to hold off the Arsian onslaught that approaches like the wind.

Well vaughan after going to the website to take a look at it, I only see aaaaarrrrrgghhh coff coff wheeze gasp WINDOWS clients there...

So I guess I won't give it a try.

As for those other project failures you mention, along with others you didn't, yes, there have been several failures. You mentioned the issue with the d2ol/tsc under the previous project team. I had some crunching time under that one too, and it really torqued me off to say the least. However in retrospect, I have been burnt much more severely by other projects that I also had some heavy time into, ie LifeMapper, Distributed Folding, and some boinc projects too believe it or not. And even now, I run off to some other projects to work at for a while, but I do keep going back to do some d2ol. The main reason being that I do believe in the effort they are working away at. The people there now have been working hard with the project, and are well aware of what the not-so-recent fiasco cost them in volunteer participation. And it did hit them hard as anyone can tell when you go look up all the teams and see the names of the members with zero points there that opted not to continue on when the project came back on line. So it's more of a humanity thing now I think insofaras the bulk of the people crunching it. The various forums aren't so full of all the stuff from the "points nazis" anymore. I have noticed that as OGR has drastically wound down, that those pesky cows have been adding some SERIOUS power to other projects. I've noticed that they have added seriously to D2OL/TSC this past week. And it just continues to amaze me the truly massive power that team has. But anyway, I'll continue to add stuff in my on/off manner to D2OL. I've gotten over their big failure, as I have with LifeMapper, and Distributed Folding. I'd go back working on those two projects too if they came back online, just because I believe in what they were trying to do.

RS.... truly a sad situation indeed. Hopefully maybe Bryan will be able to get something going to try and salvage the effort and maybe it will come to life again under a new management kind of thing. I do hope so as there was a lot of work that went into that effort. Time will tell. Meanwhile, <cheezy plug> there is always D2OL to crunch away on that works for BOTH Linux and Windows. <Big Cheezy Grin>