Eric posted at least twice this last outage. That is a 100% improvement over the last outage. Things are looking up.

Now if the Campus will fulfill the rumor of a gigabit connection between seti and the world, We could at least get rid of one problem and I'd think It would make up for what the campus did recently to our connection. :D

Yea that would be sweet, qwest is putting in Fiber in my area right now. Should be up and running by the end of the month so they say.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

Eric posted at least twice this last outage. That is a 100% improvement over the last outage. Things are looking up.

Yep - that's cool to know whats going on...

Now if the Campus will fulfill the rumor of a gigabit connection between seti and the world, We could at least get rid of one problem and I'd think It would make up for what the campus did recently to our connection. :D

:) - yep - agree. I think that full gigabit all the way would be a partial solution to all the problems.

Cheers,

Profi

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Certainly you're not the one who should say good bye to me....-find another tissue to wipe your nose...- crunch some 10x credits you have and we'll start chatting.. Instead of posting start crunching...-I't seems like leaving your computer idle will do more good than writing kiss-off's and good-bye's - 'cause to me you're totally wasting your computer's cycles. And this "somebody" is maybe you? - because being with the project over 10 years and earning not even 400K is like being semi-idle...and waiting in queue..

AS if credits are the be all and end all of whatever it is we're doing here.

With comments like that, it's really time they gave up on the damn things and give nothing away, then we'll see who stays and who goes. Are you then staying? Why do I doubt that very seriously?

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I thought that it was more toward 3 weeks....its been a long time since then.

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I'm always amazed/amused at all the people who keep predicting that SETI users will leave in large flocks because of the "bad service". Take a look at Scarecrow's graph of users. In particular, look at the graph at the very bottom of this page.

2 years only - look at the growth rate when S@H was Classic - growt was amazing back then...You're long enough (even longer than me) to know that. I don't think it will be rapid and everybody will resign. I think that people will start to think about project change and some of them will switch. The project shoud grow - now the growth rate is minimal.

The number of active hosts is pretty flat, while the total number of hosts climbs slowly over the last 365 days (which includes some major "bad service" events). This tells me that there is some turn over in users who sign up, give it a try, and then quit for whatever reasons.

I agree it would be interesting to see the data further back. Does anyone have it? There are graphs of both users and hosts on Scarecrow's site, my comments apply pretty much to both.

Or new users sign up and stay and the same amount of people who started to get upset or resigned due to frequent failures and leave the project...And active users attach more cpus..

Maybe, maybe not. Need more data. Lots of us here in the 10 year club...

Since S@H has a hard time generating enough work for this existing user base, why would they bother with any extra effort to retain more users or generate new users?

To be a biggest project and to keep this position?

According to BOINC Stats and Scarecrows statistics over half of all the active BOINC users are active SETI users. The other 40% or so are spread over more than 50 other projects. SETI's position is safe for a while.

To be always on the frontier of science and distributed computing?

I think S@H has proven that very old second hand servers, running freeware and volunteer written code, have limits. How will any more users add to that knowledge? How can a very limited staff of scientists do science if they have to spend time coddling annoyed users?

To finally manage to process all incoming data in the realtime (or close to that)?

First, I need to see the scientific value in that. Second, you don't need a team of Berkeley scientists to accomplish that. Lots of e-commerce sites have shown us that all it takes is time and money.

To enhance search area (spatially and spectrally)? You choose - it's not hard to figure..

Exactly. Time and money are very finite resources at S@H. Every minute and every penny spent of keeping users contented takes away from real science. A balance must be struck.

Users (and their machines) ARE the true power of S@H - It was many times underlined by S@H staff and it's well self explanatory. The more users the more power - the more power the bigger things you can achieve.

In the long run, I agree. But right now users and power don't appear to be the limit. How will adding more users today help us when Arecibo is shut down, or when the last of the old servers finally dies? Need to spend some time on those topics too, and right now.

All it would produce is more people griping about lack of work, lack of respect, lack of customer service, etc. I hope they have found more important things to spend their time on.

Like what?

Science. New funding. New staffing. Volunteers are lined up and waiting right now, that issue can wait.

That's how it's working. If Edison would give up on 15th burned lightbulb you still would be sitting with the candle.

I expect S@H would love to have Edison's funding, corrected for inflation. Who said they're giving up on the science?

And feeling the pressure (apart from stressing staff a bit) influence changes and improvement.

My experience in working in and managing scientific and technical teams is that pressure to improve the science does help. Pressure to keep vaguely defined "outsiders" happy makes people update their resumes.

What could be more important than pushing the hardware to the limits, testing DB's engines, figuring out new distribution/scientific algorithms, using new hardware for data processing - especially when running scientific distributed project?

Nothing. Certainly not public relations, unless it generates new funding.

Certainly the purpose is not to gather unconcerned people...There is no point in this - the project is glued by the great idea, devotion of users and passion of staff...otherwise it would break and split apart.

In my moments of quiet despair about this project (and I do have them) I wonder if part of the experiment is to push the users, and see at what point we all give up. As I said before, we are not there yet. The 10 year club survivors all appear devoted and passionate after all these years.

If this bother you, goodbye. Thanks for the CPU cycles. There is somebody standing in line to take your place.

It bothers me (in a positive way)- and it's a pity that people like RottenMutt wanting to quit due to project failures.... - those peoples are legends (my hat off here).

Certainly you're not the one who should say good bye to me....-find another tissue to wipe your nose...- crunch some 10x credits you have and we'll start chatting.. Instead of posting start crunching...-I't seems like leaving your computer idle will do more good than writing kiss-off's and good-bye's - 'cause to me you're totally wasting your computer's cycles. And this "somebody" is maybe you? - because being with the project over 10 years and earning not even 400K is like being semi-idle...and waiting in queue..

So the fact that you spend more money on computers makes you a better person than me, and gives you a bigger say in how S@H is run? Seriously?

I'm not griping neither most of the people - they are concerned not picky (and maybe a little resigned if failures are too frequent).

Maybe we have an issue in language usage here. It sounds to me like you are griping.

Apart from using idle cycles I want to utilize S@H to burn-in my new hardware. I was just saying, that due to failures I'm unable to use S@H for this purpose and I'll have to find another solution to test it (although S@H client stesses CPU+GPU pretty well - I wouldn't want to change that - only when forced). It's not the mater of complaining - it's a matter of running business, money and fulfilling testing duties. I have to have a decent reliable tool. Hope made myself clear on this one..

Very clear. You expect S@H to provide a free service to you, for business purposes. What happened to volunteer devotion and spirit?

Fine Print: this polite kiss-off reflects the views of this user only, and is not the offical position of this station, this network, or its sponsers.

I can do even smaller Footnote: And I can add colors too. Your kiss-off was not polite - even when "polite" words were used. Sometimes tone of your voice/composition of sentence tells more then words spoken. I don't meant to discourage you nor offend you- keep crunching, but if you want to say goodbye to me - save it..And you don't need to make "Legal Notice/Statement" hence you're not representing "this station, this network, or its sponsers"

The fine print was just an attempt to lighten up a conversation that I feel has become much more serious than it deserves to be lately. I know humour doesn't always translate well.

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The problem is that you're trying to find ways to make the server have more uptime. This is contrary to the entire thesis of BOINC. The idea is that you do not need a server with 100% or even 80% uptime.

Not true! I think you're missing the point. What is "entire thesis of BOINC"? I think it's to create Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - so to create a tool for scientists or developers who want's to run distributed project - to make it uniform, thus providing the platform for users to participate in more than one project if they are willing to. If not - a BOINC is a "carrier" of science application(s) - so still - if one wants to participate in a single project, it's desired for project servers to keep up with the work distribution. So yes - I would like to see S@#H having 98%+ uptime.

And you know this is not true based on your reading of the white papers that explain the BOINC design?

The goal is to make computing affordable.

You don't make it affordable by spending lots of money. You make it affordable by minimizing costs.

OzzFan is making this point because he's actually read the white papers. He's bothered to figure it out.

If you disagree, you're either too lazy to research, or you'd rather make up the rules as you go.

The goal is not to make the SETI servers more reliable, but to understand that people's expectations are far off base. SETI never promised to have work available all the time.

I don't believe what I'm reading here...

Again, due to a lack of reading or comprehension.

More reliable servers (and a steady flow of work) are desirable, but they're things we'd like, not necessarily based on reality.

SETI@Home (and Serendip) get a "free ride" because there is no money for telescope time -- they don't control the telescope.

When the telescope is used to transmit (planetary radar) it's off. When they're doing maintenance it's off. When they get data, they get whatever they get.

Data is sent on hard disks via FedEx because that's the cheapest way to buy bandwidth.

The project has exceedingly finite resources.

The BOINC client has a cache to keep work when things are broken or work is unavailable.

Uploads and downloads are scheduled to try to minimize the peak server loads and deal with congestion and outages.

Reporting is done in batches to limit transactions to what will fit with the relatively tiny servers.

... and the overall BOINC design accepts that this won't always be enough to keep everyone busy.

Why? Because it's cheaper than building high-reliability servers -- by 10x or more. Redundancy is wickedly expensive.

But, most people would rather make up the goals instead of read what BOINC or SETI@Home actually says.

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In one respect, I prefer the old S@H. Just download the wu's (whatever you could get) & crunch away for a week, then upload/download (via 56k dial-up) on a Fri evening after 18:00 as that was when the weekend started(for call usage).

Now we have Boinc so that when(not if)Seti goes down, one can crunch a backup project....best of both worlds IMO.

---

BTW.

What brings the 1 GB Inet connection to the lab, if the SETI@home servers are incapable to handle this big traffic?


____________
[Optimized project applications, for to increase your PC performance (double RAC)!][Overview of abbreviations, which are used often in forum and their meaning.]

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Has anoyone heard the "Fat Lady Sing, Yet?"

Regards

---

Please consider a Donation to the Seti Project.

Ok - just to comment post from Bill Walker (Ned Ludd tomorrow - sorry 4:30 a.m here...:) - got to work from 8:00 a.m.) :

I agree it would be interesting to see the data further back. Does anyone have it? There are graphs of both users and hosts on Scarecrow's site, my comments apply pretty much to both.

OK. Maybe if we would heve some more data we could judge more precisely... On the other hand - it's just my feeling of how's the whole thing evolving....

Maybe, maybe not. Need more data. Lots of us here in the 10 year club...

Agree. Data needed. Maybe a new (active) users /users without credits within lets say 60 days (quitted) would shed come light here... My proposition
was just exemplary one..

According to BOINC Stats and Scarecrows statistics over half of all the active BOINC users are active SETI users. The other 40% or so are spread over more than 50 other projects. SETI's position is safe for a while.

For a while...we see how the things will go if the current fail rate maintains....It would be worth checking different project growth ratio..(yeah - I know that not everyone quitting S@H will join another project...).

I think S@H has proven that very old second hand servers, running freeware and volunteer written code, have limits.

?? - second hand?? - you mean betas - or engineering samples?? If you are thinking that for example:

* jocelyn: Sun V40z (4 x 2.2GHz Opteron, 28 GB RAM)
* mork: Intel Server (4 x six-core 2.13GHz Xeon, 64 GB RAM)
* thinman: AMD Server (2 x 2.4GHz Opteron, 16 GB RAM)
* thumper: Sun Fire X4500 (2 x dual-core 2.6GHz Opteron, 16 GB RAM)
* vader: Intel Server (4 x dual-core 3GHz Xeon, 16 GB RAM)

are very old "crappy" machines that I think you're sorely wrong.. I'm working on a cheaper/weaker machines most of the time.. And I totally agree - even those mentioned machines have their load limits (especially when the excessive load is a long lasting one). Every machine composed of mechanical (stresses, wearing) and electronical parts (unsteady states, parameters change with time i.e. capacity of electrolythic capacitors) has it's limits - no doubt here. One have to figure out how to give a failover protection (either by doubling machines or distributing their load or by other means)

How will any more users add to that knowledge?

A law of complex systems... - staff at S@H is finding problems with the commonly used freeware software not approchable for other users (most of them are not even close to stress put by such complex and demanding project... They are reaching tables limits, concurency problems and many various issues that 99% of people are not even aware they exist)

How can a very limited staff of scientists do science if they have to spend time coddling annoyed users?

OK - to put it bluntly - we are their tools to make science... - It's nice for them to keep people informed (just a short note) if they have problems (an action taking 2 minutes - nobody is that occupied to neglect 250000 users wondering what's going on)

To finally manage to process all incoming data in the realtime (or close to that)?

First, I need to see the scientific value in that. Second, you don't need a team of Berkeley scientists to accomplish that. Lots of e-commerce sites have shown us that all it takes is time and money.

ok - for me it's self explanatory. To have an instant results from scientific data input it's a scientist's dream - believe me.. No scientific proof needed here... To process all the incoming data from Arecibo in a real time, the extreme amount of processing power is required - so yes - time and colosal amout of money is required, but due to technological evolution CUDA and STREAM technologies are affordable for common users thus giving a great tool to reach the goal for S@H...

Time and money are very finite resources at S@H.

Agreed.

Every minute and every penny spent of keeping users contented takes away from real science.

?? - not true - it's not "keeping users contented" but using the uncertain tool in a proper way. S@H science would be nothing without users "kept contented"...
(there will be no S@H science at all or it would be marginal)[/quote]

A balance must be struck.

A balance - that's what been lately forgotten and now restored...

Users (and their machines) ARE the true power of S@H - It was many times underlined by S@H staff and it's well self explanatory. The more users the more power - the more power the bigger things you can achieve.

In the long run, I agree. But right now users and power don't appear to be the limit.

I'm trying to be a little more forseeing...They may have become a limit if nothing changes.

How will adding more users today help us when Arecibo is shut down,

We still have a plenty of old data to process with enchanced resolution...Arecibo is not shut down forever - when the collecting of data will start - almost ANY number of users/machines is required to crunch that amount of data...- in the mean time -there is a PLENTY work to do....

or when the last of the old servers finally dies?

Example - you can estimate a workload/CPU power for the replacement basing on the demand growth from the users - it's just an example....

Need to spend some time on those topics too, and right now.

I have spent enough time now on this I think..

All it would produce is more people griping about lack of work, lack of respect, lack of customer service, etc. I hope they have found more important things to spend their time on.

Like what?

Science - Not(hing) without users - no computing power.

New funding -> no science -> no funding...


New staffing -> no science -> no funding -> no new staff.

Volunteers are lined up and waiting right now, that issue can wait.

Returning to square one.... - waiting for what? - WU's to come? If situation won't change people will start to leave (it will be a slow process) - BOINC is a perfect platform to start a journey with other more stable project..at least I think so.

I expect S@H would love to have Edison's funding, corrected for inflation. Who said they're giving up on the science?

Edison it's just an example - if you can't find a deeper meaning in this - I can't help it...So you're claiming that S@H staff should neglect the opinion of active users and terminate all the social relation with S@ users community?? - they simply should not care about the project growt rate? - I'm really sorry for you....

And feeling the pressure (apart from stressing staff a bit) influence changes and improvement.

My experience in working in and managing scientific and technical teams is that pressure to improve the science does help. Pressure to keep vaguely defined "outsiders" happy makes people update their resumes.

What do you mean by "vaguely defined "outsiders"" ?

Certainly not public relations, unless it generates new funding.

And in case of distributed projects I think that a number of active users is a very important parameter to get appropriate funding...

In my moments of quiet despair about this project (and I do have them) I wonder if part of the experiment is to push the users, and see at what point we all give up. As I said before, we are not there yet. The 10 year club survivors all appear devoted and passionate after all these years.

So... we have a lot in common after all....:) Glad to hear that.

[quote]If this bother you, goodbye. Thanks for the CPU cycles. There is somebody standing in line to take your place.

So the fact that you spend more money on computers makes you a better person than me, and gives you a bigger say in how S@H is run? Seriously?

Nope - never claimed that.. And about how S@H is run when compared our RAC - I struggle approximately 10x harder with project failures than you. If you are not crunching intensively enough - you may not even notice that something happened to the project. If you'll reach 150K of RottenMutt RAC or 6K of mine(was better I know - shortage now :)) - you'll see... Seriously...

Maybe we have an issue in language usage here. It sounds to me like you are griping.

Nope - we don't have a language cap here...It's a bit different to be angry or upset from being careing for somethin and indicate that something isn't right and stimulate and define own expectations in non offensive way. Yet again - if you're seeing my position as "griping person" - I can't help it.

Very clear. You expect S@H to provide a free service to you, for business purposes. What happened to volunteer devotion and spirit?

OMG - you're so wrong - very wrong....- "to provide a free service to you, for business purposes" - yes as a useful piggyback - when working - superb tool for simultaneous stressing of CPU+GPU - and yes - mutual profits - I have tested hardware - S@H crunched data.. . "volunteer devotion and spirit" - I think I still have it - otherwise I would not spend time posting this message (see the header of the message) and would not run S@H on many machines 24/7..

The fine print was just an attempt to lighten up a conversation that I feel has become much more serious than it deserves to be lately. I know humour doesn't always translate well.

Yep - pressure rose a bit... now everything restores to nominal...


I have never seen inserted formalism to lighten up the conversation - usually it's creating opposite effect. Humor translated well here - I've added even smaller footnote (and with colours)...And the other side is that I think that you have to trim a sense of humor when refering to things your interlocutor cares about (even in the proximity of entity) - so that's where a language transmitting function succeded (message with context received and understood)and a perception and processing of information failed (refused jokes when speaking about relevant things).

Keep crunching

Profi.

P.s. I think that this case is closed (at least for me). I'll not reply to this any further.

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Ok - just to comment post from Bill Walker (Ned Ludd tomorrow - sorry 4:30 a.m here...:) - got to work from 8:00 a.m.)

While it may be interesting for some to hear what you think BOINC is supposed to do, or why you think it should be for something else, they're your opinions.

When the architects say "This is what we're trying to do" their statement is definitive.

You can say that you disagree with their goals. You can argue that the implementation falls short, but you can't argue with the definition.

The white papers say "affordable" and go on to explain that they are giving up redundancy and high-reliability in order to drive down cost dramatically.

There is lots of good information here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BoincPapers

If you're going to respond intelligently, you have to do your homework first.

If you don't, it's uniformed opinion, and I'm not that interested. There are plenty of useful ideas to discuss without making up your own rules on the way.

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And you know this is not true based on your reading of the white papers that explain the BOINC design?

Do you need to read them to know the profile of the project you're participate in?? I'm not much of a reader - doing so if only something is wrong or I can't figure something by myself...I'm relying on my practice and feeling of the profile of S@H and my understanding of the idea of distributed computing.

The goal is to make computing affordable.

I think that affordable means "easy to deploy" or "available to everybody" - I think that goal of BOINC is on one side to create a platform for scientists for creating distributed projects with ease, in uniform way, with focusing on science as much as possible (BOINC is taking off their shoulders issues like transmission, security, client-server relations, results validation and stuff like that. On the other side the paltform is allowing various people using different computer hardware to participate in such projects and streate outout of the work in a coherent way (results have to be platform-independent) - so this is "affordable" on the clients' side - this is my understanding of the whole thing without going into much details...

You don't make it affordable by spending lots of money. You make it affordable by minimizing costs.

You have to balance that -let's say not minimizing but optimizing - you'll not be able to run project like S@H on a shoe string budget - otherwise you'll build a project of a shape of giant on a strawy legs - it will fail in sooner or later.

OzzFan is making this point because he's actually read the white papers. He's bothered to figure it out.

You guys may have a time to read whitepapers of BOINC, S@H etc. - I don't have. I'm glad to hear different opinions... Also reading does not exactly mean understanding - it's a pretty complex system so one may neglect some issues important to another person. (I'm not saying that OzzFan is not understanding what he reads). Again - I read whitepapers when I have to - it's like reading Licence Agreement when installin BOINC client..- I never do it (yes I know that it may generate some problems - I'm accepting that)

If you disagree, you're either too lazy to research, or you'd rather make up the rules as you go.

And who are you to judge me ?? - yet another talkative person - Seeing your profile it seems like you want to become a moderator or sth, because you are able to take a position in every case - even not having a clue... As for "Lazy" - I'm working 18+ hours a day lately - I DO NOT have time to read whitepapers nor forum posts (it's what you're doing most of the time I see....) And I'm not making up rules - as for S@H I'm going with the flow. If not failures I would not be posting. Try not to defend a project blindly.

Sometimes I'm feeling like in a socialistic regime - maybe it's my (users) fault that by joining and crunching we create a stress on a S@H servers causing them to fail??

The goal is not to make the SETI servers more reliable, but to understand that people's expectations are far off base. SETI never promised to have work available all the time.

I don't believe what I'm reading here...

Again, due to a lack of reading or comprehension.

It seems like you have a problem with comrehension or you are unable/not patient enough to read the full context...When I start to read the post - I read it fully...And I don't think I'm having a comprehension problem.

More reliable servers (and a steady flow of work) are desirable, but they're things we'd like, not necessarily based on reality.

Nobody is expecting from you orS@H staff to invent new servers - sometimes it's a matter of new approach to solve problems (i.e combine machines to solve problems, double them to increase stability and QoS, etc.). Let's face it - those guys at Berkeley ARE creating the trends in a distributed computing world and thus creating distributed computing reality (they made S@H and BOINC - wonderful things I'm participating in of a complexity I can barely imagine - they just did it). Servers and hardware are just tools - they have to do their best to reach the goal with tools they have - if not succeeding - they may have to change the way they use tools (i.e. figure out new ways to overcome problems with hardware/software at hand).

SETI@Home (and Serendip) get a "free ride" because there is no money for telescope time -- they don't control the telescope.

100% true and I agree - those are "piggyback" projects.

When the telescope is used to transmit (planetary radar) it's off. When they're doing maintenance it's off. When they get data, they get whatever they get.

Data is sent on hard disks via FedEx because that's the cheapest way to buy bandwidth.

The project has exceedingly finite resources.

I know all that - I'm in the project as long as you are.... Don't treat me as a newbie...

The BOINC client has a cache to keep work when things are broken or work is unavailable.

Once again - I don't want to create huge cache on my numerous machines when making burn-in tests- it would worsen the situation - I'm using 3 days cache. If I'm unable to fetch/send results for a longer time - go figure...

People having small RAC may not even notice that something is wrong, but peoples/maniacs :) building super-machines will detect it instantly - I saw posts when someone was claiming that even fully working project cannot keep up with the demand of their machine (probably when you have 3x Tesla/Fermi and GTX295 or some Radeons and add 8+ cores & overclock all that - the machine may exceed number of allowed WUs per day per machine limit..)

Uploads and downloads are scheduled to try to minimize the peak server loads and deal with congestion and outages.

They are fairly random concerning the number of users. Get postphoned when there is a problem with connection/servers. And create a fairly constant load on servers.

Reporting is done in batches to limit transactions to what will fit with the relatively tiny servers.

Yes - in the intervals. And those may be user-enforced (and server-side accepted or not..)

... and the overall BOINC design accepts that this won't always be enough to keep everyone busy.

BOINC design - yes, very often people not...

Why? Because it's cheaper than building high-reliability servers -- by 10x or more.

At some point it's a matter of the Quality of Service - one may not find it amusing nor interesting to participate in a project constantly failing.

Redundancy is wickedly expensive.

So why S@H staff decided to double sci database/create backups? Maybe it should be also run on a single-drive PC - we would have a project starting from scratch once every month or so...Redundancy - thats is one of the solutions used in the computing world to get decent uptimes have failover and create robust systems (i.e. idea of RAID, PSU redundancy, server "heartbeat" monitoring) - sometimes - you just have to do it... - it may not be cheap - but sometimes it's worth spending some extra money even without expanding capabilities but just to increase reliability.

But, most people would rather make up the goals instead of read what BOINC or SETI@Home actually says.

...have you read all the articles of S@H/BOINC staff? Articles from Planetary Society?? Maybe added some NSF/UC Berkeley statements/papers/budgets?? (seems like youre definately read all the posts - I even didn't manage to do that...:) - ok then - you've read more than I did.. In this case I'm making up my goals - I'll live with that..If it'll come to that my "made up (expected) goals" are so different from offered by project... - then I'll humbly accept the kiss-off good-bye proposal of Bill Walker...


Cheers & keep on crunching

Profi

p.s. As for this thread - I'll not post here/reply anymore - simply don't have time - sorry. Got to catch up with my duties...I feel like I'm stressing S@H servers with such a long posts.. :)

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Shouldn't this be transferred to the politics thread?
Seems to have become a 'religious' discussion.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

P.s. I think that this case is closed (at least for me). I'll not reply to this any further.

Nice way of saying "I will not discuss this any further. I am right, you are wrong, you just don't see it yet. Just give in and start seeing things my way."

First you ask a couple of questions/further explanations in your post, then you say not to answer to it as you're not interested anymore and wave people off like they're annoying children. "Be gone child, I have better things to do."

It's nice for them to keep people informed (just a short note) if they have problems (an action taking 2 minutes - nobody is that occupied to neglect 250000 users wondering what's going on)

I'm speaking only for myself here, but here's what my reaction is when I see BOINC has problems downloading from or uploading to Seti: I check the server status page to see if we're out of work, or servers are down, or what the last update time is on the server page. I'll then check the forums, to see if I am the only one with the problem. 99.9999% of the times, others will have posted about the same problems already.

So, I then know there's a problem and it isn't just me. I then check my time and what time it is in Berkeley (subtract 9 hours from my local time). Most of the time it's in the middle of Berkeley's night, when I would expect honourable Seti admins to lay on one or more ears, snoring away. Knowing that nothing will be done about it for the next couple of hours, I go about my usual business.

I may be answering some of the early risers in Q&A who noticed there's a problem, who reset their BOINC, who detached/reattached, who all start their own thread...

Now all this time I know there's a problem. I know that I can't do anything about it, so why should I worry about it, or get angry? My BOINC is running Einstein, QuantumFIRE Alpha and Primegrid without problems. It's got work, it's busy burning electrons.

Even if the problem lasts for days on end, my BOINC will be busy. Sometimes it happens that one or more other projects have their own problems at the same time as Seti has theirs, but since I am attached to 30+ projects, I can always choose another one, or couple, to (temporarily) take over.

After a couple of days, things turn nasty on the forums. In my opinion, the people who choose to run this project only - while BOINC gives them the possibility to do all those other projects as well as backup in times of scarceness - should look no further than at their mirror image. Is it the project's fault that their CPUs ran out of work to do? Is it BOINC's fault? Really now.

As for posting the notice (on the front page) that there are problems, what do you want them to post there? That there are problems? You already know that. Even with a notice on the front page, or in the Tech News forum, or wherever, people will not find it and go straight to the forums of choice, post their own question on top of 18 similar questions already populating that forum, or post in a thread that has nothing to do with their question, but was the first one they came across and was open to post in (!!).

Even if the moderators put sticky posts in all forums, people will not read the warning.

And then there is that warning from the admins that there are problems. The next question everyone will need to have answered is what the problems are exactly, what is being done to solve them, how long this is going to take, etc. If indulged and given a timeline, but the deadline on that passed, the users will demand more attention from the admins, a new deadline, more answers, what went wrong this time?

Those 2 minutes you state will easily become multiple hours, time better spent on actually fixing the problem, being on the phone to the ISP, or hardware helpdesks, that sort of thing. Do you want the problem found and fixed, or do you want small talk and your hand held throughout the outage?

A further thing is that messages on the front page need to be put in on a server in the server cabinet. Not a likely place for any of the admin to be all the time. They cannot post there from the SSL network, they cannot post there from home. I know of experience that when I am concentrating on trying to figure out why some piece of hardware isn't working as I think it should, that I cannot stand any distractions, as then I may lose where I was in the debugging process. But you want the admins to do just that and post something that there are problems, a thing we all already know?

They've posted something yesterday, so then today and tomorrow people will demand updates. preferably as detailed as possible, with a record of what the admins did from the time they got up in the morning, to the time they went to bed again. Sad.

And about how S@H is run when compared our RAC - I struggle approximately 10x harder with project failures than you. If you are not crunching intensively enough - you may not even notice that something happened to the project. If you'll reach 150K of RottenMutt RAC or 6K of mine(was better I know - shortage now :)) - you'll see... Seriously...

Have you looked at Bill's account and seen he's not just crunching for Seti, but for a myriad of other projects as well? Or is that the wrong thing to do?

Should we be here solely for Seti and not condone other projects to use up any precious cycles on our CPUs? Should we use our computers only for crunching Seti and not use them for anything else whatsoever? Isn't that our own choice? Most interestingly, isn't that going against what BOINC and Seti are made for?

http://boinc.berkeley.edu wrote:

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

That you choose not to use the idle time, but run 24/7 all out on all your computers, doesn't mean we all have to do that, does it?

We have an equal opportunity to finding the WOW signal, as no matter whose computer found it first, it will have to be checked and rechecked. Not just by another volunteer's computer, but by independent sources as well. We may have more chance at winning the lottery than finding this elusive signal. But if you measure your chances of success at your credit or RAC, then all the best to you.

Do know that we're not all interested in the credits, that we're not all in it to win, that we don't all want an unknown amount of computers hacking away at this, that some of us want to give cancer a chance to be overcome as well (as an example).

Writing that someone isn't doing their best because his or hers credit and RAC is nowhere near yours is nothing less of anti social. You might even be putting off aspiring newcomers, who read your post and think, "I will never make that, so why bother?", who leave before they had a chance to start.

We may not be in the same league, we may never be in the same league, but really now, does my amount of credit and RAC make me any less of a person than you are? Even if you had trillions of credit, if you had as many as there are grains of sand in the Sahara desert, even a handful of grains of sand would be worth more than all your credits together.

With that said, I'm off to play some Painkiller Battle out of Hell, for which I exit BOINC. Tough. :-)

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Shouldn't this be transferred to the politics thread?
Seems to have become a 'religious' discussion.

Amen.

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...have you read all the articles of S@H/BOINC staff? Articles from Planetary Society?? Maybe added some NSF/UC Berkeley statements/papers/budgets?? (seems like youre definately read all the posts - I even didn't manage to do that...:) - ok then - you've read more than I did.. In this case I'm making up my goals - I'll live with that..If it'll come to that my "made up (expected) goals" are so different from offered by project... - then I'll humbly accept the kiss-off good-bye proposal of Bill Walker...

Some people simply choose ignorance.

We're talking about what BOINC is supposed to do (bring big computing into reach of projects who otherwise can't afford it).

You can read about that from a number of sources.

The white papers written by the BOINC staff, where they talk about the goals and decisions are primary sources. If David Anderson is one of the authors, writing about BOINC, then the paper is definitive.

The Planetary Society articles are one-level removed, with the idea of bringing the word to a popular audience. These popular articles are not scientifically rigorous, and they aren't generally written by BOINC staff. It is someone else's interpretation of what they think they understand about BOINC.

Proposals written by the BOINC Staff to the NSF (for the purpose of getting funding) are primary sources.

The U.C. Berkeley budget for SSL and SETI may explain why SETI@Home can't afford new servers or more space, but it doesn't say anything at all about how they intend to work within the budget.

You are suggesting that I'm mistaken because I haven't read what other people think, instead of reading what the BOINC team actually says?

Profi, you have simply chosen to make up the rules as you go along, and then complain when the project doesn't follow your pipe-dreams.

There is way too much of that in these forums -- too many people who think the servers must be five-nines reliability without realizing that is fiscally impossible.

If SETI@Home needed 99.999% uptime, we would not be here arguing about it.

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Time for this thread to go bye bye...........

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

I agree it would be interesting to see the data further back. Does anyone have it? There are graphs of both users and hosts on Scarecrow's site, my comments apply pretty much to both.

FWIW, I scrounged up an old tape and was able to extend the Total/Active Graphs back about another year (to May '08). I don't think I have anything older than that. So in the next hour or so when the scripts run you should be able to travel back in time a little further.

Seems that everyone has a differing expectation of what SETI is supposed to provide.
Myself, I came across SETI while poking around the internet.
I signed on after reading the blurb about donating computer time for the project.

I came in unaware that there were forums to discuss almost anything with the other members and unaware there were credits issued for work done.

I enjoy getting into a dust-up occasionally in the forums and I don't care about credits.
If the forums and the credits were removed from the system, it wouldn't matter.
I would still allow SETI to run on my machine even if down time is part of participating in this.

.

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I do not fight fascists because I think I can win.
I fight them because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges

A riot is the language of the unheard. -Martin Luther King, Jr.