Till interest rises again......

[Brucifer]

I think that if interest here is going to rise again that is is up to us to get it to rise. If we all sit around waiting for it, it ain't gonna happen....

I also think that we need to get a major push going in a project that can capitalize on what we have some power in, and what that boils down to is some gpu's. So maybe like a major concerted team effort in getting the team position moved up in Collatz possibly since that is a pretty stable operating project for the gpu world for both stream and cuda gpu's. Or maybe we need a push in a very stream friendly project and a co-push in a very cuda friendly project???? Reason I bring it up is that it seems that there is always a herd of new boinc projects, but they don't last long, or they don't have work, or yada yada yada. We've got to get the team up into the main limelights of a few projects that really matter, to attract some more interested people. We just flat don't have enough people to try stabbing at every boinc project that comes rolling down the street. For every one of those that flops and goes out of business we just wasted a bunch of cpu/gpu time that could have still been an active on-going project helping the team. We are better off generating some serious interest and activity in a few good projects than just being nothing in a bunch of them.

Maybe someone has another long term project or two that would be good for the team positioning and have realistic growth potential for the team to improve it's placement????

We need to do something around here, or else we are just going to continue the hemorrhage of crunchers that move on to other projects. We used to have some races here that offered prizes that a few members coughed up for the team members. I've coughed up prizes in the past, and can cough up some again if the interest is there.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions????

[NeoGen]

I was thinking the other day... what do the power crunchers here do with their old GPU's when they replace them for the new ones?

Because if we got unused GPUs capable of crunching, lets have some challenges.
If we don't have enough people for some challenges then maybe donate them to people with free PCI slots.

[liuqyn]

sorry, but I use 'em til they burn up.

luckily that's only been one so far.

[vaughan]

Brucifer we are focussed. AMDave posted about Dynaping and we are the leading team in RAC currently. We have challenges underway in Simap and Poem and there is interest in WCG. We have 21 people running Folding@Home.

[Brucifer]

ah so..... Then the moderators can kindly delete this thread as I was/am mistaken.

[Beerknurd]

People seem to still be crunching along, just not posting on the boards...

[NeoGen]

ah so..... Then the moderators can kindly delete this thread as I was/am mistaken.

I would say leave it up to remind ourselves that it is up to us to keep this place alive.

[Steve Lux]

I'm still crunching away at projects of interest to me. I'm not one to jump onto new projects, because I was burned once by putting everything I had into it and then it shut down on me. So, I plan to stick with projects that seem to have some teeth to them and that appear to be in this for the long term - and is science that I consider useful. As long as the team is contributing to those projects I'm interested in, I'm there.

If you leave me alone on a project too long, like in Majestic-12 - I'm moving that project to a team that is working on it. One person working alone on a project does not make a team.

As for making significant increases in crunching capacity, I like many I know have had to scale back due to the economic reality of our present time. That said; my son, who wants to go into IT, is presently specing out to build an AMD 12-core server system. I'm mostly letting him do the specifying and we've already had to add another order for items he missed. This will be his first build, with just a bit of guidance by me to ensure the components are compatible. He has to start somewhere. I already know he's forgotten to order the software, but I want him to learn as he goes. Sometimes the best way to learn things is the tougher way.

When we get this system going and have my home network built I plan to put this on Einstein and/or a medical research project. I have 6 cores on Einstein now, a 200% increase should be fun.

As for not posting much, well, I don't usually have much to say.

[Dirk Broer]

I hope your son has thought about the GPU power of the monster as well (12 cores, drool...) Not that Einstein uses them economically (the Cuda-code takes a GPU together with a whole CPU core), but a decent scientific server/workstation-oriented GPU (a nVidia Quadro 6000 or a Tesla C2050), though expensive, might work wonders.

[NeoGen]

I have already planned out specs for my future machines, and upgrades to the existing ones, but the savings are low, and christmas season is coming near, which means lots of expenses, so I'm aiming to 2011 to start ordering parts.
I'm in IT as well, I do a good bit of programming (among many other things), so I am planning to initially build an AMD based system (still not sure how many cores but will start small and upgrade later) with 4 Gb of RAM (later expanding to the max capacity of the board) for making it my Virtual machines server, where I will have virtual machines dedicated for databases, source code management, and other functions, and of course some just to use Dimes and FreeHal as those require almost no CPU to run and give you points just for being running.
I will run something CPU-wise on it but not bother with GPUs, probably choose a board with onboard graphics even, as I believe that GPUs are not really detected through virtual machines yet so they would not be usable.

And also have plans for a Media Center, a storage system, and several crunchers, but alas... things have to be carefully planned and deployed as money does not stretch as much as we wish it did.