Cold Call (May 12 2009)

Today's Tuesday, which means regular outage day for us. The project is already coming back to life as I write this sentence, though Bob still has some work to do to sync the beta replica database up again (a process which failed last week due to one of the tables unexpectedly needing repair).

I got a funny call out of the blue yesterday from a person who works at a music production facility in LA. They do a lot of CPU intensive work there, and were surprised to find a bunch of BOINC clients running on their systems slowing things down. I'm guessing a former employee (or current employee afraid to speak up) planted them on as many CPUs as possible. Anyway, I'm not sure how he got my number, and even less why he chose to call me of all people, especially since the clients were all apparently running Einstein@home. Nevertheless, I gave him some uninstall tips, and that was that.

Still working on the talk, which is slowly coming into shape. I'm trying to squeeze in 10 years' worth of digressions about work creation/distribution, databases, web sites, and networks, as well as back-end server war stories into about 20 minutes. It's been a trip down memory lane, and we're kind of kicking ourselves for not taking as many pictures back
in the day of our puny little setup. I can't believe we got this thing off the ground with 3 Sun Ultra 10's (all doubling as desktops for me, Jeff, and Dan) and 2 IPC's. Our current server closet contains about 150 CPUs, 100 TB of disk, and 150 GB of RAM.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Thanks for the update and the good work.

As to the music, I did notice that when Apple went from Tiger to Leopard the maximum system nice value went from 19 to 20 but BOINC hasn't seemed to picked up on that yet. Don't know what they are running, but it reminded me of this and thought I should mention it.


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I quickly counted the cpu's listed on the server page and found about 40 cpu's. Yet, Matt reports about 150 CPU's. What do the others do?