The big picture; any pieces missing?

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Profile Stubbles
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Message 1804712 - Posted: 24 Jul 2016, 20:19:29 UTC

Hello all!
It's been 3 months now that I've been keeping up and participating with the threads in Q&A and Number Crunching, and lately I've been thinking about the big picture in order to find other ways to contribute something somewhere.

It seems to me there is a need for:
    1. a S@H wiki in order to collect topic specific content from the forum. This would provide a topic specific reference for new active participants.
    2. the Lunatics v0.44 CPU apps to be distributed by the S@h server as stock (if possible) since SoG seems good-enough-for-now on the GPUs until Petri's apps;
    3. monthly formal updates from the S@h project staff about upcoming projects and focus, and where volunteers could get involved;
    4. monthly formal updates from the S@h volunteer app developers;
    5. procedures and knowledge needed on how to be an active "volunteer tester" (other than just pimping a few rigs with older hardware to S@h Beta);
    6. an alternative metric for baselines other than RAC & credits per day;
    7. better stats about the big picture (like Shaggie's GPU output under stock, and Anonymous Platform in top 10k PCs), with an initial focus on top 10k PCs & top 10k SETIzens, such as:
      a. the % of total contribution by PCs with 1+ GPU vs no GPU
      b. the % of total contribution by top 10k PCs & 10k SETIzens;
      c. {other useful stats to be identified by all of you}

    8. providing SETIzens with an easy way to compare their CPU &/or GPU to other PCs with the same devices;
    9. finding other ways to have more SETIzens get involved in S@h other than just pimping their PCs;
    10. {other items to be identified by all of you}

This is just a brain dump and I don't know if anything like this has been tried before...so any comments/suggestions are welcome...just please try to keep it constructive!

Looking forward to your replies.
Cheers,
Rob ;-D


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Message 1804728 - Posted: 24 Jul 2016, 23:30:36 UTC - in response to Message 1804712.  

I've been thinking about a Wiki too -- or at the very least a collection of guides. There's been a few things I've figured out with more google than I care to admit:

- How to only crunch when electricity is cheap for you (bonus marks for auto-hibernate and resume scheduled tasks that I wrote that sync the project before shutting down).

- Recommended tweaks for specific cards (eg: setting process priority higher for CUDA tasks so they can keep the GPU fed even when the CPU is busy).

- Multiprocessing your GPU: I'm not entirely convinced this is a good thing for all projects/cards (my experiments showed it being questionable) so having an organized place for testimony might be good.

I don't mind farting around and pulling stats -- especially if I can get it all from host.gz because then I'm not putting any strain on the S@H web server.

Like you suggest, a standardized offline benchmark would be really helpful: all you need is to give BOINC a set of constant tasks with expected output and you you can run them in isolation -- right now the only approach is "wait for a while to see if your RAC improves" which is an already volatile signal.

I think having a benchmark would be really good for media coverage if you could get the hardware sites to use it when reviewing GPUs (anandtech, tomshardware etc).

I'm not familiar enough with how app_info.xml works but I imagine it wouldn't be too crazy to figure something out.

The other irrational demand I wish I could make is to have the AMD cards annotated better -- I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the OpenCL driver or the S@H app but it's extremely frustrating to try to make sense of "AMD Fiji" especially when the NVIDIA cards are so nicely detailed.
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Message 1804805 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 12:36:09 UTC

If a simple hosted wiki is needed, I could probably donate a sub-domain.

I would be nice to have all of this info in a dedicated place instead of searching the S@H forums/google.
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Message 1804812 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 13:02:13 UTC - in response to Message 1804728.  

I'm not familiar enough with how app_info.xml works but I imagine it wouldn't be too crazy to figure something out.

View messages, in order, first.

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Message 1804867 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 20:06:49 UTC

Here's a list of random thoughts about a S@h wiki:
- I'm surprised that no one has replied about a S@H wiki having been tried in the past.
- If we go ahead with this idea, it might be good to do a quick survey of other BOINC projects to see if any have a Wiki.
- From looking at: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/, it seems that each country/language has done something on its own.
- I personally feel that the info in the wiki should belong to the S@h project so a domain should be something like: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/setiathome or http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/wiki
- If a non-berkeley.edu domain name is used, any net income (revenue - expenses) from ads should be donated to: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu for specific volunteer projects that require small investments.

Please voice any reasons/concerns that are/could be a show-stopper (a no-go) before starting a new thread specific to a S@h wiki.

Cheers,
Rob ;-)
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Message 1804913 - Posted: 26 Jul 2016, 1:06:52 UTC

Oh, the Wiki of nonsense.

Never mind.
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Message 1804977 - Posted: 26 Jul 2016, 11:50:55 UTC - in response to Message 1804712.  

Hello all!
2. the Lunatics v0.44 CPU apps to be distributed by the S@h server as stock (if possible) since SoG seems good-enough-for-now on the GPUs until Petri's apps;

It does more than month already.


4. monthly formal updates from the S@h volunteer app developers;

??
Maybe daily reports on volunteer devs tasks progress instead? I understand that some reading is entertaining but some writing will help better :P
There is special pinned thread to subscribe BTW.
Cause no sense to write every month what need to be done just to write it. Who really can help already found ways to do that, for others it's entertaining only...


6. an alternative metric for baselines other than RAC & credits per day;

Formulated already, just put in WiKi.

And regarding benchmarks availability - Lunatics, download section. All that you need for offline benchmarking in SETI.
SETI apps news
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Message boards : Number crunching : The big picture; any pieces missing?


 
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