boinc stuff

[Brucifer]

@PoorBoy -- Lol, Good to hear from you!! I thought about dropping by and posting a note. However your flyer on the boinc thing makes it sound like you guys are just the big time.

Too bad about the travails with some of the BS team members. I don't know what it is that makes some people lose their common sense about teams and points. They carry on like a member's points are their own and the team's points and forget that they truly belong to the person that crunched them, who pays the electrical billz and buys the hardware. The other item is how some of them get ticked because someone gives someone else some points and crunches for them ---- saying that those points don't belong to the other person, meanwhile those same people will gladly take ownership of the points they crunch on corporate computers that aren't "their" machines. Or they get really incensed when someone crunchez stuff for another team, failing to realize that anything anyone does for any team is a gift. But maybe then I'm just an old fashioned old fart.

Yes, the GPU's are in a totally different league than the cpu's. And things are progressing at the point with them that now (ATI at least) some serious improvements are_being/have_been made in the power consumption arena. I have just finished changing out my cuda gpu's and am now 100% ATI. And while performance was definitely a consideration, the main issue was the lower power consumption and heat generation. Like you, I keep a number of systems going in one room, and have a/c issues to take into account as how it all impacts my monthly electrical bill. I have even gotten to the point that I don't like to run anything that uses the cpu's, rather just concentrating on capitalizing on the far superior crunching of the gpu. Those quads suck up a lot of power at full load.

But it's good to see that you are doing well and happy and now have a place to crunch where you feel comfortable and have team mates in the same category.

The crunching world has definitely changed since the beginning of the classic seti project years ago. My interest in it now has grown to the point that I'm no longer a total team maven that I was in the earlier days. There have been enough years at it now that I have accumulated a good number of friends on different teams. And that's what drives my crunching anymore. I've done considerable crunching for multiple teams. In the beginning I caught a lot of heat over it, and some folks really got upset with me. However as time has marched on most of the places I crunch for have realized that I have friends on several teams, and try to help all of them. It's more of a friend thing now days than the early days of just total team competition. LOL So in my long story here, basically I guess what I'm saying is that I totally understand your reasons behind your PB Toyz Team, and am glad that you are having fun in the crunching world. Who knows, maybe I'll even add yours to my list of crunching efforts at some point in time. :-)

[Steve Lux]

To me it's all about the science - the progress. If a GPU can do it and do it +10x better than a CPU, well then, all the better. If we help save lives by understanding protein folding, if we learn more about our universe, if we get a better understanding of materials science and other topics by the shared power of distributed computing - well silly virtual points are basically meaningless aren't they?

I moved one of my projects over to FreeDC because I was basically the only one on The AMD-Users team crawling for MJ-12. If it's to be a team effort, then in my mind it should be an effort of multiple members of the team. As long as team members are consistantly helping with a project that I care to crunch for I'll stick. If I'm doing a project solo, then I'm moving project resources to a team that is active. I'm not losing any sleep over who gets the virtual points though. It's the results that matter.

[Jason1478963]

Congrats on that #3 spot...that is very impressive. I can only imagine the electric bills to get to that spot. I've been able to use my water cooling to dump heat in a storage tank thus avoiding a dedicated a/c unit. I feel that my bills a large enough without dedicated a/c part. I can really appreciate what you guys are doing for science even if it is just a hobby. Congrats again and good luck guys