I like to see what computers people are using and I am so surprised to see that some users have like 20-30 machines. And some have multiple flagship machines like Athlon X2's and Pentium 800 series dual cores. I wish I could have that kind of set up. Well maybe one day right. :)

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AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
AMD AthlonXP 3200+

I like to see what computers people are using and I am so surprised to see that some users have like 20-30 machines. And some have multiple flagship machines like Athlon X2's and Pentium 800 series dual cores. I wish I could have that kind of set up. Well maybe one day right. :)

Certaintly there are some individuals with 10s of systems at home, I know of at least one with ~60 boxes all over the house.

There are also many participants who either have total control of IT in their companies or schools, or have permission to do what they like. These often have 10s or even 100s of PCs to run on.

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There are also many participants who either have total control of IT in their companies or schools, or have permission to do what they like. These often have 10s or even 100s of PCs to run on.

I don't like the idea of using the resources of others doing my work, that is bad style methinks.

I like to see what computers people are using and I am so surprised to see that some users have like 20-30 machines. And some have multiple flagship machines like Athlon X2's and Pentium 800 series dual cores. I wish I could have that kind of set up. Well maybe one day right. :)

Depends...
Building and upgrading my setup to the current levels took some 6 years, and I'm currently at the point where TOC (Total Cost of Ownership) due to Energy Costs and the heat production (Thermal Management) in Summer are the definitive limiting factors

There is a downside to everything I guess

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It does get to be a bit of a bug, 5 years my home network is now:

31 boxes
56.4 GHz processor
3.5TB disk
11GB memory

These are anything from PIII 500MHz to AMD 64 3200+

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It does get to be a bit of a bug, 5 years my home network is now:
31 boxes
56.4 GHz processor
3.5TB disk
11GB memory
These are anything from PIII 500MHz to AMD 64 3200+

You could do MUCH better if you ran some optimized versions! I have an AMD 3200+ on Windows and am running an optimized client and am doing units in around 3550 seconds while your machine is taking over twice as long!
Mine is getting around 400 or so recent average credits, while yours is only doing 40!

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I like to see what computers people are using and I am so surprised to see that some users have like 20-30 machines. And some have multiple flagship machines like Athlon X2's and Pentium 800 series dual cores. I wish I could have that kind of set up. Well maybe one day right. :)

I am one of those guys with multiple machines and it happened over years. I have been crunching for Seti since Dec 1999. Back then it was on just one machine. Now I have 5 on Classic and 15 on Boinc. SOME of the Classic ones will come over, most won't. I do computer repairs for firends on the side, I upgrade their pc's and they pay me by giving me their uneeded parts. I have upgraded some several times as they want faster and faster machines. Naturally I get their old boxes and they then crunch! The latest 2 machines of mine are an AMD 3200+ and a P4D 840EE, those were bought because my wife wanted a couple of new expensive cameras. She gets something expensive, I get something expensive. Berkeley and my stats love it.

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You could do MUCH better if you ran some optimized versions! I have an AMD 3200+ on Windows and am running an optimized client and am doing units in around 3550 seconds while your machine is taking over twice as long!
Mine is getting around 400 or so recent average credits, while yours is only doing 40!

Umm..well..if I ran an optimised core client I could "fix" or even "inflate" my benchmarks. That would mean in the utterly meaningless cross-project stats I would be higher....so that's not really too important is it. I also run Rosetta, and because that has no quorum system but simply grants what you claim, to my mind an optimised common client would give me an unfair advantage there. I used to be really wound up about the whole credit system. But as it has evolved with CPDN not using it, Rosetta no quorum, PP@H having homogenous reundancy, optimised apps, optimised common clients etc. any effort to compare yourself to others cross-project is pointless, the data on which the stats are built is wildly wrong. As I am, and have always been, a cross-project kind of person I just ignore it now. Come the day when the credit system is sorted out, fair and equitable (by flop-counting or whatever route seems best) I may take an interest, but for now I may as well change the stats in my sig to a set of randomly-generated numbers, it would be as meaningful.

I could run optimised science apps and reduce runtimes, but I run vanilla project science applications on (personal) principle, and not all projects have optimised apps anyway. So that wouldn't make much difference.

And as to RAC of 40 versus 400 - this just proves (again) how meaningless RAC is. You are running SETI with Einstein according to your sig, I run at least 5 projects concurrently on equal shares, plus Beta test, plus D2OL, plus my own stuff which can be very CPU intensive. So I suggest the RAC between the two machines isn't comparable.


Not a personal attack on you, just explaining why I'm not rushing round installing optimised code everywhere :)

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You could do MUCH better if you ran some optimized versions! I have an AMD 3200+ on Windows and am running an optimized client and am doing units in around 3550 seconds while your machine is taking over twice as long!
Mine is getting around 400 or so recent average credits, while yours is only doing 40!

Umm..well..if I ran an optimised core client I could "fix" or even "inflate" my benchmarks. That would mean in the utterly meaningless cross-project stats I would be higher....so that's not really too important is it. I also run Rosetta, and because that has no quorum system but simply grants what you claim, to my mind an optimised common client would give me an unfair advantage there. I used to be really wound up about the whole credit system. But as it has evolved with CPDN not using it, Rosetta no quorum, PP@H having homogenous reundancy, optimised apps, optimised common clients etc. any effort to compare yourself to others cross-project is pointless, the data on which the stats are built is wildly wrong. As I am, and have always been, a cross-project kind of person I just ignore it now. Come the day when the credit system is sorted out, fair and equitable (by flop-counting or whatever route seems best) I may take an interest, but for now I may as well change the stats in my sig to a set of randomly-generated numbers, it would be as meaningful.

I could run optimised science apps and reduce runtimes, but I run vanilla project science applications on (personal) principle, and not all projects have optimised apps anyway. So that wouldn't make much difference.

And as to RAC of 40 versus 400 - this just proves (again) how meaningless RAC is. You are running SETI with Einstein according to your sig, I run at least 5 projects concurrently on equal shares, plus Beta test, plus D2OL, plus my own stuff which can be very CPU intensive. So I suggest the RAC between the two machines isn't comparable.


Not a personal attack on you, just explaining why I'm not rushing round installing optimised code everywhere :)

WOW! All I have is 2 Laptops and a broken down desktop!!!!

Ricky

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WOW! All I have is 2 Laptops and a broken down desktop!!!!

Ricky

I started with a Celeron 333......

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Some have said that the optimized clients don't really do more science but that they just inflate artificially the benchmarks?

Question is----do optimized clients really do more work or just grant the optimized user more credits?

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

Some have said that the optimized clients don't really do more science but that they just inflate artificially the benchmarks?

Question is----do optimized clients really do more work or just grant the optimized user more credits?

You have to learn the correct terminology.

Client is the BOINC client boinc.exe this does the management for projects and runs the benchmark, Optimised clients run a benchmark that increases the benchmark numbers.

It is the optimised science application that decreases the crunching time.

Used together the increased numbers should ideally increase the claimed credits to the same score as using both un-optimised.

The unfortunate results of this is, if the host computer is crunching for more than one project and these projects do not have optimised applications then the computer will claim more credits than it deserves for that project. In this case the decision of what to use depends on the users moral standards.

There are projects though, that do not use the benchmark * crunch time method to calculate claimed cedits, such as climate pridiction.

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Wow, I didn't mean for this to turn into a flame fest, just wondering how people have so many hosts.

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AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
AMD AthlonXP 3200+

I like to see what computers people are using and I am so surprised to see that some users have like 20-30 machines. And some have multiple flagship machines like Athlon X2's and Pentium 800 series dual cores. I wish I could have that kind of set up. Well maybe one day right. :)

I have a lot of local computers in my farm -- but aside from 2 or 3 754's (which are not really flagship cost these days (less than $180 from Fry's including MB and fan), most are 'mid line' -- XP2400 to XP3000 or P4 2400 to 3000.

And these get 'cycled' -- as when one of my clients is looking to replace an older computer, I can get them one from my farm within a couple of days. Of course I tend to replace 'up' from there.

The interesting thing is I've kept with my primary computer now for over two year's -- it is now one of my local 'slugs' (XP2400). As it is now year end, I need to do some tax buying, so I'll foodchain CPU's. I have a couple of motherboards which support FSB 400 XP's -- and I expect to upgrade them -- that will allow me to replace my XP2400 with an XP2700.

The thing is, one of these days I will do a major upgrade on my primary workstation -- it is just that getting that done is a major effort -- lots of stuff to move when I do it, the detritus of 2 years plus as a primary computer. When I do that sort of thing, I'll move up to a 'flagship' CPU -- probably early next year with a 939. I don't have any need for dual core.

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Some have said that the optimized clients don't really do more science but that they just inflate artificially the benchmarks?

Question is----do optimized clients really do more work or just grant the optimized user more credits?

You have to learn the correct terminology.

Client is the BOINC client boinc.exe this does the management for projects and runs the benchmark, Optimised clients run a benchmark that increases the benchmark numbers.

It is the optimised science application that decreases the crunching time.

Used together the increased numbers should ideally increase the claimed credits to the same score as using both un-optimised.

The unfortunate results of this is, if the host computer is crunching for more than one project and these projects do not have optimised applications then the computer will claim more credits than it deserves for that project. In this case the decision of what to use depends on the users moral standards.

There are projects though, that do not use the benchmark * crunch time method to calculate claimed cedits, such as climate pridiction.

Well...I am just ignorant then. What I want to know is if I optimize one or more of my computers or teams computers will it do 'faster science' or just inflate credits.? I love the credit system and probably wouldn't be here without it but my primary interest is crunching this data. Maybe I wasn't clear as I have read many other posts that claim that crunching data through an optimized client is akin to cheating and not helping the project. I want to garner the most credits I can get through honest means...after all I am an Objectivist. :-)

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

What I want to know is if I optimize one or more of my computers or teams computers will it do 'faster science' or just inflate credits.?

You're still missing the point. There are TWO different things that can be "optimized". One is the client. That does nothing for the science, but it inflates credits.

The other is the science application itself. That does nothing for the credit (in fact it reduces it per result) but helps the science, by letting you get more work done in the same time. To compensate for the lowering of credit due to this optimization of the application, people get the optimized client. As long as you keep them "matched", there's no cheating involved under any stretch of the moral code.

If you were to put on ONLY an optimized client, people would complain. If you were to put on ONLY an optimized science application, nobody would complain, but you would earn less credit.

If you only do SETI and you put on both, everything is great again, but you're doing more AND earning more credit for doing it. If you do other projects - it gets more complicated.

Wow, I didn't mean for this to turn into a flame fest, just wondering how people have so many hosts.

If you think THIS is a flame fest just stick around a little longer :)

I have 3 desktops at home plus a laptop. They all have different functions and have been built over time. I didn't build any of them specifically for distributed computing but they all participate. At work I have 2 workstations under my direct control so they run BOINC as well. The 2 quad opteron machines are our new database servers and I ran BOINC on them as a burn-in test while we were testing them and getting them ready for production. Good thing too - turns out one of them had a bad voltage regulator on one of its CPUs. It was fun while it lasted but they are going into production this weekend so crunching has come to an end.

Some people also get friends to run BOINC for them. So it doesn't always take riches - sometimes luck, fate and opportunity help out :)

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A member of The Knights Who Say NI!
For rankings, history graphs and more, check out:
My BOINC stats site

If you were to put on ONLY an optimized science application, nobody would complain, but you would earn less credit.

I agree with everything Bill has said, including the above. However, we aren't Talking about getting 1/2 credit, or even 90% credit. If you run a higher cache like 3 days you end up getting 96% or more of the standard clients credit due to the granting credit process. I don't use an optimized client, but do use an optimized application. I'm getting twice the work done, and getting almost exactly the same as people with a standard client when it comes to credit per wu. This effectively doubles my Rac/host scores. The use of an optimized "boinc" client just pretty much guarentees it, but it's use is problematic.

tony

If you were to put on ONLY an optimized science application, nobody would complain, but you would earn less credit.

I agree with everything Bill has said, including the above. However, we aren't Talking about getting 1/2 credit, or even 90% credit. If you run a higher cache like 3 days you end up getting 96% or more of the standard clients credit due to the granting credit process. I don't use an optimized client, but do use an optimized application. I'm getting twice the work done, and getting almost exactly the same as people with a standard client when it comes to credit per wu. This effectively doubles my Rac/host scores. The use of an optimized "boinc" client just pretty much guarentees it, but it's use is problematic.

tony

OK, i'm a bit new at this "farm" thingy. How many PC's does it take to say you are running a "farm" and does it ever become a "ranch" or do we just stick with the term "farm".

Ricky

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OK, i'm a bit new at this "farm" thingy. How many PC's does it take to say you are running a "farm" and does it ever become a "ranch" or do we just stick with the term "farm". Ricky

Yes, upto 3, or 5 I forget, machines makes you a "gardener", upto 15 makes you a "farmer" and over 15 makes you a "rancher". I do not know after that.

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