Humor me...I talk to myself

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
I knew that there would be complaints when WCG shifted to Krembil Research Institute. There were a few wrinkles, but the shift has been smoother than I expected. The complaints that bother me the most are ones about the statistics. Many complainers had simply been too lazy to click-around and see where to find information.

My complaint is broader and I have not expressed it at WCG. Why didn't they take the opportunity to make their statistics conform to the BOINC framework? That would make it simple for people who are familiar with Rosetta@home, Milkyway@home, etc. to shift projects without having to learn the WCG stats reports and website layout. WCG stats evolved from United Devices and the opportunity to standardize was missed when WCG was established and added to BOINC to appeal to a broader population. WCG wanted it two ways: Ours and ours. They seemed to reluctantly become a BOINC project at all. On the forums, members were chastised for even mentioning other projects. Sometime back in the early stages (2002), I left and ran 42 months with Find-a-Drug. Find-a-Drug had distributed servers (gasp! Keith Davies learned something about distributed computing and applied it. The stats were always available without downtime every day.)

When Find-a-Drug (FAD) abruptly ended after 42 months, FAD members were at a loss for a new project. Keith Davies suggested that Folding@home was the best project. We went in several directions, and many went back to WCG. I am reflecting my resentment and prejudice against WCG, but they really do have a "go it alone" attitude that has made me feel that "outsiders" from SETI and other projects are unwelcome. I wish they would fully join BOINC...starting with the statistics and website layout.
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
I just bought a pair of CPUs for $62 that will increase the Dell PowerEdge T420 to 40 threads instead of 24. I'll have to shift back to WCG from Rosetta because of limited RAM (until I find some more RAM that will work). That old server just keeps chugging without problems.
 

Nick Name

Administrator
USA team member
I knew that there would be complaints when WCG shifted to Krembil Research Institute. There were a few wrinkles, but the shift has been smoother than I expected. The complaints that bother me the most are ones about the statistics. Many complainers had simply been too lazy to click-around and see where to find information.

My complaint is broader and I have not expressed it at WCG. Why didn't they take the opportunity to make their statistics conform to the BOINC framework? That would make it simple for people who are familiar with Rosetta@home, Milkyway@home, etc. to shift projects without having to learn the WCG stats reports and website layout. WCG stats evolved from United Devices and the opportunity to standardize was missed when WCG was established and added to BOINC to appeal to a broader population. WCG wanted it two ways: Ours and ours. They seemed to reluctantly become a BOINC project at all. On the forums, members were chastised for even mentioning other projects. Sometime back in the early stages (2002), I left and ran 42 months with Find-a-Drug. Find-a-Drug had distributed servers (gasp! Keith Davies learned something about distributed computing and applied it. The stats were always available without downtime every day.)

When Find-a-Drug (FAD) abruptly ended after 42 months, FAD members were at a loss for a new project. Keith Davies suggested that Folding@home was the best project. We went in several directions, and many went back to WCG. I am reflecting my resentment and prejudice against WCG, but they really do have a "go it alone" attitude that has made me feel that "outsiders" from SETI and other projects are unwelcome. I wish they would fully join BOINC...starting with the statistics and website layout.
This would be as good a time as any to standardize things, although I"m sure there's a large number that only run WCG and would get annoyed if things changed. I don't care about the stats so much but it's very difficult to find project and preference settings compared usual BOINC projects. That's my main complaint.
 

Nick Name

Administrator
USA team member
I just bought a pair of CPUs for $62 that will increase the Dell PowerEdge T420 to 40 threads instead of 24. I'll have to shift back to WCG from Rosetta because of limited RAM (until I find some more RAM that will work). That old server just keeps chugging without problems.
Silicon seems pretty hard to kill unless you're overclocking or have some sort of ancillary failure. My own vintage E5-2687W Xeons are still chugging away. I almost wish they'd die so I'd have an excuse to upgrade. :ROFLMAO:
 

doneske

Well-Known Member
USA team member
This would be as good a time as any to standardize things, although I"m sure there's a large number that only run WCG and would get annoyed if things changed. I don't care about the stats so much but it's very difficult to find project and preference settings compared usual BOINC projects. That's my main complaint.
I started out with SETI back in the 90s and then switched to FAH about 2001 after attending a Vijay Pande lecture at Rice University when my son was doing his graduate work and then moved to WCG in 2004. So, for me, there never was a "standard" to get used to. I think all the BOINC projects look the same because that is the web capability that is distributed with the BOINC server code. The admins don't have to create their own website from scratch. In my opinion, it has a lot of shortcomings too and it isn't always consistent between projects either. Prime Grid looks a whole lot different than SiDock for example. Personally, I like a difference in sites. It makes it interesting and shows creativity in how to present the same data. In my 40 years as an IT person (yep, started with the IBM 360 model 30) it was constant change but made the job interesting. If one stays with the same thing over and over and over again ("if it ain't broke don't fix it) how do you ever innovate or keep from getting bored? Over the past 17 years, I've probably contributed 98% to WCG. In my opinion, they didn't change enough. The site is essentially the same site it was back in 2004. I have to agree though that the new site is so radically different from everything else it does make using it a challenge for experienced BOINC users. Let's face it, are you really going to create a website that doesn't offend someone? BTW, have they actually switched anything yet? I hadn't seen anything indicating to me that any hardware has been switched out. I'm not even sure the website hardware has changed. I thought they just put up a new version of the website to backup their announcement of the switch to Kembril.
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
BTW, have they actually switched anything yet? I hadn't seen anything indicating to me that any hardware has been switched out. I'm not even sure the website hardware has changed. I thought they just put up a new version of the website to backup their announcement of the switch to Kembril.
You are correct.
 

Nick Name

Administrator
USA team member
I started out with SETI back in the 90s and then switched to FAH about 2001 after attending a Vijay Pande lecture at Rice University when my son was doing his graduate work and then moved to WCG in 2004. So, for me, there never was a "standard" to get used to. I think all the BOINC projects look the same because that is the web capability that is distributed with the BOINC server code. The admins don't have to create their own website from scratch. In my opinion, it has a lot of shortcomings too and it isn't always consistent between projects either. Prime Grid looks a whole lot different than SiDock for example. Personally, I like a difference in sites. It makes it interesting and shows creativity in how to present the same data. In my 40 years as an IT person (yep, started with the IBM 360 model 30) it was constant change but made the job interesting. If one stays with the same thing over and over and over again ("if it ain't broke don't fix it) how do you ever innovate or keep from getting bored? Over the past 17 years, I've probably contributed 98% to WCG. In my opinion, they didn't change enough. The site is essentially the same site it was back in 2004. I have to agree though that the new site is so radically different from everything else it does make using it a challenge for experienced BOINC users. Let's face it, are you really going to create a website that doesn't offend someone? BTW, have they actually switched anything yet? I hadn't seen anything indicating to me that any hardware has been switched out. I'm not even sure the website hardware has changed. I thought they just put up a new version of the website to backup their announcement of the switch to Kembril.
PrimeGrid looks different because they're one of the few projects - in fact the only one I can think of offhand - that has additional locations besides the standard Default, Home, School and Work. That's because they have so many more apps than the normal project. Einstein also looks different because they're running a lot of custom code and also started running Drupal for their site management. Location management is pretty standard though. If I want to assign a computer to a different location or change app settings for a location, that's easily found on most BOINC projects. I usually have to hunt awhile on WCG before I find it. :ROFLMAO:

I'm late to the BOINC / distributed computing compared to a lot of folks. I never heard of it until I built my first pc around 2009.
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
I am disappointed that my processors for the Dell PowerEdge T420 cannot be used in my server. I'll try again after I sell these. The seller, eGoods Supply, was so good that I did not want to return them.

As you know, one has to be careful when looking for an item at eBay. I searched for Intel E5-2470 V2. When I found a super price, I forgot to carefully read the item description and bought Intel E5-2670 V2.
 
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Nick Name

Administrator
USA team member
I ran into this problem when I got mine, luckily they weren't incompatible they were just older than what I thought I was getting. I think I just got confused, but I've seen especially on Amazon where you search for something and you get results that aren't what you're looking for.
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
When will I ever learn to not waste an hour or two tweaking BIOS or using overclocking apps, losing crunching time, in hope of finding something that will recover the lost hour in the next week or month? And then I find that I am already pushing the limit of my liquid cooling system, because these Intel i9 10850K processors don't have much overhead and the power increase is nearly double to go from 4.8 GHz to 5.4 GHz. Put me in the slow-learners class. I'm sure I'll try something else soon.
 

RONNIE

Well-Known Member
USA team member
When will I ever learn to not waste an hour or two tweaking BIOS or using overclocking apps, losing crunching time, in hope of finding something that will recover the lost hour in the next week or month? And then I find that I am already pushing the limit of my liquid cooling system, because these Intel i9 10850K processors don't have much overhead and the power increase is nearly double to go from 4.8 GHz to 5.4 GHz. Put me in the slow-learners class. I'm sure I'll try something else soon.
I empathize with your situation. I guess it's difficult for us to accept that Boinc projects do not really need our help but only our devices... :) Have a nice weekend!
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
At WCG, member "Boca Raton Community HS" wanted to know which WCG projects are best suited for their computer described as

Chassis: Dell Precision Tower 7920
CPU: DUAL Intel Xeon Gold 6258R 2.7GHz,(4.0GHz Turbo, 28 core) = 56 cores, 112 threads
RAM: 512GB DDR4 2933MHz ECC
GPU: DUAL Nvidia RTX A6000, 48GB each, soon NVLinked = 96GB
Storage: Four (4) M.2 1TB PCIe NVMe Class 50 Solid State Drive in RAID 10 along with a storage array that features ten (10) 1.92TB SATA AG Enterprise Solid State Drives in RAID 10
Display: 8K, 32 inches

After writing a thoughtful post with linked references about cc_config, app_config, boinc.exe version 7.15.0, and other tweaks to run WCG, I deleted my post and refrained from saying, "Dude, you need to run Folding@home and forget about running SLI, too ."
 

Nick Name

Administrator
USA team member
I would say run whatever you want but forget about NVLink unless you're running other applications that will use it. It's irrelevant in the BOINC world. I expect this system has a business purpose though and isn't just for BOINC.
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
The school bought the computer specifically to run computational chemistry projects, but the GPUs are not currently utilized at WCG. No tweaking would be required to run Folding@home. It would run "out of the box" without issues.
 

RONNIE

Well-Known Member
USA team member
At WCG, member "Boca Raton Community HS" wanted to know which WCG projects are best suited for their computer described as

After writing a thoughtful post with linked references about cc_config, app_config, boinc.exe version 7.15.0, and other tweaks to run WCG, I deleted my post and refrained from saying, "Dude, you need to run Folding@home and forget about running SLI, too ."
My (much simpler than this one) computer is also best suited for Folding@home, but they don't have challenges and I really want to contribute to some WCG projects (such as MCM). Therefore, although it's probably not my best computational choice, I've been recently running both. :)(y)
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
There were more than two hundred people at our church today. Since Thursday will be Veterans' Day, veterans were recognized. There were only eight of us. All of the men were over 65 and there were two women, about 45 and 25. I often wonder, "Will anyone be willing to defend this country when needed?"
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
I am still unable to sit at my computer for more than five minutes due to swelling. I had MAKO™ TOTAL KNEE REPLACEMENT SURGERY on the 14th of December. I'm still crunching WCG.
 

RONNIE

Well-Known Member
USA team member
I am still unable to sit at my computer for more than five minutes due to swelling. I had MAKO™ TOTAL KNEE REPLACEMENT SURGERY on the 14th of December. I'm still crunching WCG.
It seems there's no need to sit for crunching. Happy new knee and year! And we are now #42 in points (WCG).
 

Vester

Well-Known Member
USA team member
We are expecting a snow/sleet/ice event in our area beginning Saturday night, 15 January. I anticipate that we will lose electrical power. I will shut down my two computers in order to conserve the APS Back UPS 1500 battery for operating our LP gas tankless hot water heater. The hot water heater needs 10 milliamps for the igniter. Without power, we will depend on LP gas logs in the fireplace and an LP gas heater. Our predicted high temperature next Monday is 32 degrees F. I know, it is springtime in Alaska for some, but it is cold for this area. Our Siberian Husky is loving it.
 

RONNIE

Well-Known Member
USA team member
We are expecting a snow/sleet/ice event in our area beginning Saturday night, 15 January. I anticipate that we will lose electrical power. I will shut down my two computers in order to conserve the APS Back UPS 1500 battery for operating our LP gas tankless hot water heater. The hot water heater needs 10 milliamps for the igniter. Without power, we will depend on LP gas logs in the fireplace and an LP gas heater. Our predicted high temperature next Monday is 32 degrees F. I know, it is springtime in Alaska for some, but it is cold for this area. Our Siberian Husky is loving it.
We do love BOINC & Science. But we love even more humans and huskies. So, don't worry and take care!
 
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