Here is something for you all that want to volunteer you computer to something good that
actually seams to work without messing up all the time.

http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm

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Yeah, volunteer your computer's resources so some major corporation can patent even more of the human genome.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Here is something for you all that want to volunteer you computer to something good that
actually seams to work without messing up all the time.

http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm

I have tried WorldCommunityGrid which is related to Grid.Org and had decided that BOINC is a far better idea.
There has been some discussion about Grid and WCG on these boards, as an example see here. Patenting and for-profit/not-for-profit status was discussed a lot in the WCG fora.

Things may have moved on since I was last involved, I don't know. I just like being able to run a variety of projects from one single place easily.

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Yeah, volunteer your computer's resources so some major corporation can patent even more of the human genome.

Hmm.. Yes I supose the University of Oxford is all bandits and Berkeley is
all angels right? ;)

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Yeah, volunteer your computer's resources so some major corporation can patent even more of the human genome.

Hmm.. Yes I supose the University of Oxford is all bandits and Berkeley is
all angels right? ;)

Grid.org says that it belongs to United Devices (a for-profit corporation that sells distributed computing software) and IBM (a for-profit corporation that sells something -- I'm not sure what given their current commercials).

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I'll take the line of least resistance -- Berkeley and the BOINC packages get my spare time ...

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There's also http://www.distributed.net/
The RC5 project has a cash prize.

The Prize

RSA Labs is offering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. The distribution of the cash will be as follows:

* $1000 to the winner
* $1000 to the winner's team (or to the winner if not on a team)
* $6000 to a non-profit organization chosen by all participants
* $2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code

I wonder if SETI could be chosen as the non-profit organization.

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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

For a fairly comprehensive list of available projects try Distributed Computing

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Three projects that I'm eager to get involved with or start crunching for are:

PlanetQuest: Detecting new planets on your computer.

ALife@Home: Artificial intelligence (Neural Networks).

orbit@home: Detecting Near Earth Objects and possible collisions.

And when they're ready, I can attach them to BOINC.

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Three projects that I'm eager to get involved with or start crunching for are:

PlanetQuest: Detecting new planets on your computer.

ALife@Home: Artificial intelligence (Neural Networks).

orbit@home: Detecting Near Earth Objects and possible collisions.

And when they're ready, I can attach them to BOINC.

You copied *MY* list! :)

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Three projects that I'm eager to get involved with or start crunching for are:

PlanetQuest: Detecting new planets on your computer.

ALife@Home: Artificial intelligence (Neural Networks).

orbit@home: Detecting Near Earth Objects and possible collisions.

And when they're ready, I can attach them to BOINC.

If ever BOINC gets ready, and I truly hope so. Now it just looks like a waste of time. If it was posible to go back to clasic Seti@home I would do that.

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Three projects that I'm eager to get involved with or start crunching for are:

PlanetQuest: Detecting new planets on your computer.

ALife@Home: Artificial intelligence (Neural Networks).

orbit@home: Detecting Near Earth Objects and possible collisions.

And when they're ready, I can attach them to BOINC.

If ever BOINC gets ready, and I truly hope so. Now it just looks like a waste of time. If it was posible to go back to clasic Seti@home I would do that.

BOINC will have it's Uptimes and it's Downtimes - and I'm still crunching.

I think BOINC is about as ready as it's ever going to be.
Check my sig for all the projects that I'm currently crunching - and yes that includes Seti.

I don't think I'm wasting my (cpu) time.

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

If ever BOINC gets ready, and I truly hope so. Now it just looks like a waste of time. If it was posible to go back to clasic Seti@home I would do that.

Don't confuse BOINC with S@H. It's not BOINC that's having the problems, but the S@H infrastructure. There are several projects you can currently attach to. Check the main page for more info.

If ever BOINC gets ready, and I truly hope so. Now it just looks like a waste of time. If it was posible to go back to clasic Seti@home I would do that.

Don't confuse BOINC with S@H. It's not BOINC that's having the problems, but the S@H infrastructure. There are several projects you can currently attach to. Check the main page for more info.

How come? the pure scale of problems was not even close to this with the old Seti@home, just take a look at endless list of problem and tell me that everything is fine and totally normal.


August 9, 2005
Outage notice: We are having a three-hour outage at 17:00 UTC on August 10 for a database backup. Data service and most web site functions will be off at this time.

August 7, 2005
We are back up after the power outage. Some backend services will remain off until the initial demand dies down.

August 4, 2005
Outage notice: We will be having a 14 hour outage, starting this Sunday (August 7) at 02:00 UTC, because of major electrical work being done at the lab.

July 26, 2005
We recently made a DNS switch affecting the scheduler. This and more can be read about in detail in Technical News.

July 22, 2005
We are looking for ways to boost workunit production See Technical News. At the current time the system having difficulty meeting demand a number of clients are getting No Work from Project messages.

July 19, 2005
We are still trying to figure out if there is a software reason for the connection drops that are causing the upload and download failures. We are also working on a hardware solution in the form of a more powerful data server machine. There are several steps to getting a new machine online but, barring any show stoppers, we hope to have it online in the next day or so.

July 15, 2005
The data server is continuing to drop connections, which is very unusual this long after an outage. We are working to figure out why.

July 12, 2005
We safely restarted the project after an all-night (planned) power outage. It will take significant time for the servers to catch up. More info in Technical News.

July 6, 2005
We had a four-hour outage this morning for database backup and UPS maintenance (one hour longer than expected).

June 30, 2005
The file upload handler crashed last night, but is back up and running now.

June 23, 2005
Update: Today's outage is postponed with the date TBD.

June 22, 2005
Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow for UPS maintenance. This will start at 17:00 UTC and should not last more than an hour.

June 21, 2005
Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow in order to back up the database. The outage will start at 17:00 UTC and last two to three hours.

June 16, 2005
Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow in order to add an index to the result table in the seti/boinc database. This index will be used to better track client errors. The outage will begin at 17:30 UTC and may last up to 2 hours.

May 24, 2005
The splitters and assimilator are offline for a day or so while we relocate the backend science database.

April 29, 2005
The DB reinit went fine. But then we had a problem with a recently installed software firewall. It was working when we left the lab yesterday but cut off the data service interface a short time later. We have switched off this firewall for now. Software firewalls are now required for all machines by campus policy but we will get an exception until ours is working. Note that we are, and always have been, behind a hardware firewall that works great. Given the length of this outage, service will be slow with lots of connection drops until the backlog is cleared.

April 27, 2005
We will be having a general outage tomorrow to do a database backup and to reinitialize our replica database server. The replica became corrupt last week due to a disk space issue. After this is done, we should not have to have outages for backups. We will start at 17:00 UTC. The outage will last several hours.

April 18, 2005
We have confirmed that there is a known network peering issue between Cogent (our ISP) and OpenTransit (France Telcom) that is affecting connectivity for many participants in Europe. Campus has opened a trouble ticket with Cogent but we are unsure that this will result in a fix. We will post news items as we learn more. Many thanks go to the posters in this message board thread for their diagnostics and work arounds.

April 17, 2005
There are reports of a connectivity problem between some parts of Europe and our Cogent facing server. We are making inquires. For discussion of the problem and a suggested workaround using proxies, see this message board thread.

April 2, 2005
We have temporarily taken down 4.10; it did not solve the graphics problem.

April 1, 2005
We have released version 4.10 of the SETI@home application for Windows. This release fixes a bug that caused graphics not to display.

March 21, 2005
Our Internet link through Cogent went down at around midnight UTC on March 18/19. It was repaired this evening, and the servers may be bogged down as they try to make up for lost time. We'll post more information once we're told what happened. Please note that we still plan to have an outage tomorrow morning (see message below).

March 18, 2005
The project will be down for 4 hours this coming Tuesday, March 22, starting at 14:00 UTC. Our building will be without power as campus tries to find the reason for the power losses we experienced a couple of weeks ago.

March 17, 2005
In preparation for shutting down SETI@home Classic (in about 1 month, hopefully) we're trying to make sure that SETI@home Classic accounts are linked to the proper SETI@home/BOINC account. This is a bit complicated because of email address changes. See our current transition plan.

March 17, 2005
We have cleaned up our account database, merging accounts with conflicting email addresses. This may cause some users to get 'Invalid or missing account key' messages. This is easy to fix; instructions are here.

March 7, 2005
All services are up and graceful shutdown in case of a power outage is in place.

February 28, 2005
Around 18:00 UTC we had another unexpected lab-wide power outage. The cause of these random failures is being investigated by campus, but all our systems/databases survived without any corruption. We will be down as we work to further protect ourselves. More info and updates in Technical News.

February 25, 2005
The database has been restored and all services are back up. The data server is very busy right now. There will be upload and download problems until the load normalizes. More info in Technical News.

February 23, 2005
Update: a breaker blew and the power for the entire lab was off for several hours. Power returned at 23:30 UTC, but we will be dealing with fallout for a while - the project will probably be down all night and through tomorrow morning. More info in Technical News.

February 19, 2005
We are still dealing with a data server storage problem. The project will be going up and down as we work on this. See Technical News.

February 18, 2005
Update. Yet another data server array hang. The vendor is looking into it.

The project has been up for several hours although the data server is a bit overwhelmed with pent up demand. We are adding services back one at a time while we monitor the data server storage array.

February 17, 2005
Update. Once the RAID rebuilds we are going to run a job to delete old workunits and results from the array. These would normally be deleted by the file deleter but the latter is still backed up from before the database migration. The project will remain off through all of this.

The data server failed around 20:30 UTC for the third time in as many days. The project will be down as we continue to diagnose the problem.

February 15, 2005
The RAID resync is complete and the project is up, although the data server is a bit overwhelmed at the moment. In positive news, the new database server is running great (today's malfunction was not on that machine).

February 4, 2005
We will restart the database migration to the new hardware Monday, February 7, at 18:00 UT. The outage will be several hours long. Currently, workunit production is falling behind demand. The splitters themselves are able to keep up but are not able to insert work fast enough because of competition for database access.

February 3, 2005
The project was offline most of the day today due to a database problem.

January 31, 2005
The DB migration stopped when the new server crashed. See Technical News.

January 26, 2005
Due to recent database problems, we had to turn off XML stats generation for the time being.

January 6, 2005
The validation backlog is slowly clearing. There appears to be no problem with validation other than the slowness the backlog itself is causing.

January 4, 2005
We are still running a backlog of results waiting to be validated and are looking into it.

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Don't confuse BOINC with S@H. It's not BOINC that's having the problems, but the S@H infrastructure. There are several projects you can currently attach to. Check the main page for more info.

How come? the pure scale of problems was not even close to this with the old Seti@home, just take a look at endless list of problem and tell me that everything is fine and totally normal.

Although the same developers who made Seti@Home, may have made Boinc, Boinc is NOT Seti@Home. Boinc is a manager, through which projects can run their science applications. Seti@Home is one science application. Einstein@Home, ClimatePrediction.Net, LHC@Home, Alife@Home, BURP, SZTAKI, Seti Beta, Protein.Predictor and Lattice@Home are all science applications running through Boinc.

Boinc runs on your computer, you attach to a project, your computer will communicate directly to that project through Boinc. Thus, not all projects out there will communicate through Seti@Home's servers.

Lots of the problems we have today with communicating to S@H were there in the past as well. You just didn't notice them so much, since your computer was slower at crunching at the time, your connection was slower, plus there weren't as many people on the same bandwidth as there are today.

Then it was just Seti@Home on the bandwidth, now S@H Classic and S@H/Boinc are running through the same network connection, all of our computers have grown faster, our internet connections are not longer 100% 56Kbit and lower.

The list you gave is fine and totally normal for a project which isn't scaling down. It isn't saying like so many other projects out there that they want at maximum 10,000 users. They are even adding to the 'problem' by adding a Beta program on the same computers & bandwidth.

As long as you can remember that neither Seti@Home and Boinc are the same thing (program wise), nor Seti Classic and Seti@Home/Boinc are the same thing (credit wise), you'll be on your way to learn a thing or two.

If not... Well, then not.

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How come? the pure scale of problems was not even close to this with the old Seti@home, just take a look at endless list of problem and tell me that everything is fine and totally normal.

Ok, I see that point ... except ...

* 1999
* 2000
* 2001
* 2002
* 2003

Which are the technical logs from the old SETI@Home site. The only thing I did to them was clean up spelling mistakes and link into the old glossary. But, if you are going to use history as your weapon, make sure that you know what you are using.

SETI@Home Classic was a very simple application. SETI@Home Powered by BOINC is quite a bit more sophisticated. There is more logic on the back end, and the net is less load on the distributed machines and higher quality results.

The last time Matt talked to this, if I recall correctly, the BOINC side of the house is doing as much science as Classic is (well, by now probably more), and with fewer machines. BOINC is not perfect, SETI@Home is not perfect, but, it truly does more ... Anyway, As those technical logs show, Classic was never perfect either... and if I recall correctly there was a one month outage in the logs ... bad as the BOINC side might be, I don't recall any outage that lasted that long since I joined the beta project.

Anyway, ... guys, BOINC is here to stay ... just relax ...

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If ever BOINC gets ready, and I truly hope so. Now it just looks like a waste of time. If it was posible to go back to clasic Seti@home I would do that.

Don't confuse BOINC with S@H. It's not BOINC that's having the problems, but the S@H infrastructure. There are several projects you can currently attach to. Check the main page for more info.

How come? the pure scale of problems was not even close to this with the old Seti@home, just take a look at endless list of problem and tell me that everything is fine and totally normal.

Yet, it seems that work is still being crunched, reported, and the backlog at the servers is decreasing.

Could it be better reporting?

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The process can be divided in.

1. processing the raw file and prepare jobs to be sent.

2. Sending data to a receiver.

3. Receiver processing the data. I can't see that the major problem is here.

4. Sending the data back.

5. Analyzing and check the result.

2, 3 & 4 should be much the same leaving 1 & 2 as the main problem as some people here states that the main problem is not related to BOINC.
If that is the case the new version of Seti@home is far to much of an alfa program and the classic Seti@home should be used instead.

If you compare the problem from 2002, 2003 & 2005
the numbers are 10, 4 & 40 so fare just for this year.
It seams that the new Seti@home is too much in a state of develop
to take over the classic version.

Tomas

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Oh I just loved all the bandwidth problems of classic that started a month or so after I joined. Geez it was frustrating during the xmas period of 01/02. I then stumbled my way around from the screen saver to SETI Driver and the cli verson and eventually found my way to a public queue a few months after that. Oh yeah classic was faultless....

Live long and crunch.

Oh I just loved all the bandwidth problems of classic that started a month or so after I joined. Geez it was frustrating during the xmas period of 01/02. I then stumbled my way around from the screen saver to SETI Driver and the cli verson and eventually found my way to a public queue a few months after that. Oh yeah classic was faultless....

Live long and crunch.

At least you could use setidriver or in my case setiqueue to keep a whole network of computers happy during outages and prioritise work when faster systems ran low.

With the amazing overestimation of processing time with this system, it is much harder to ride the bumps and the extended recovery periods than it was in classic.

This is something that many people seem to forget when they start doing splits and waving thier pom poms.

With things like setiqueue and a couple of cronjobs to start/stop alternative projects, I was perfectly able to process work for multiple projects and keep a decent workunit cache with classic so boinc still seems like a net loss to me.

Whilst I am not disputing that boinc is where it is at and that classic is going going going going going going..... gone (sometime by the next millenium), please remember that many of the reasons people give as boinc being so vastly superior are actually things that you could do fairly simply with classic alongside other distributed computing projects.

To the developers, all I can say is, keep up the good work and when you get 5 take a minute to think if what you are doing system wise at that time is going to make it impossible in the future to have a multiple computer scheduler/cache system as that is something sorely missed by many people with multiple hosts.

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