... and quickly adding so I don't get ambushed:

I don't CARE one way or the other.

Me? I'm STILL content.

Bret

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In large cities, choice of ISP is difficult as there are so many offerings

Not all of us live in large cities. so we may be stuck with either Dialup, Satellite or Packet radio (if offered)

Slightly closer to a town and we may add Cable to the mix, and still closer, DSL or Uverse if offered

The plethora appears to occur when local populations exceed roughly 150,000

The wealth of America is unevenly spread

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The top couple thousand may produce results faster, but they aren't the backbone of the project. When the project goes for a grant they don't say we have 2000 volunteers that do this much work. The project selling point is that it is supported by 150,000 volunteers. If you don't feed the masses of users then that support will dwindle away even more than it has in the past. The project will be seen as elitist and grants will be even harder to come by. Can those 2000 top crunchers come up with the half million dollars it takes to keep this project running... I don't think so.

As for the ridiculous comment about changing your ISP. This isn't an American project. It's global. Most of the world doesn't have the Internet choices available in North American cities.

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Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

I live within 20 miles of Houston. I have only one ISP available to me and the fastest DSL available in my area is 3GB. It never even aproaches that kind of speed, usually half that.

When the cricket graph is maxed out I cannot get through to Berkeley. NOTHING. You may consider my comment ridiculous but if I could change ISP I would. Instead I have to live with it or move my family. And of course I know this is a global project, America has it's own (major) problems with bandwidth in most all rural areas.

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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....

The only possible "fair" method I can see for distributing work units would be to set teired levels of uploads. This distribution method would be triggered by available work units dropping to zero on the servers.

For example:

1) For whatever reason, the servers have not split data recently, and the available work units dropped to zero.
2) When work units become available again, the work units going to each client would be restricted to one day's worth of work.
3) When work units available to distribute stays greater than zero for 24 hours, the restriction increments by a day, allowing each client to get X+1 days work.

Your RAC would only be important inasmuch as it means you would get more work units assigned because you do more in 24 hours. A high RAC user getting 10 days worth of work slows the whole project down because 50 or 100 low end users are getting no work units at all. Idle machines do no good for SETI.

Eventually, provided that the splitters can catch up and keep work units flowing, in a couple weeks, everyone should have 10 days of work units if that's what they want.

Actually, I thought the recent server-based distribution of work (before the Great Outage of 2010) worked fine. At first, set limits of n WU/CPU and m WU/GPU, regardless of machine capability.

This allowed smaller users to get their share, along with some work for heavy crunchers. Then the Team would increase the allowances as b/w permitted, and eventually waive them entirely, so big crunchers could try to fill their caches.

That policy seemed to work reasonably fairly in terms of access to WUs.

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I like the ideas recently espoused concerning fairness. The question is how to implement. When work unit production/availability is low, limit each responder to 1 WU (regular or Astro). When work unit has been returned to normal, but only for a short while, limit each responder to 1 days worth (regular or AP) As workflow returns to normal, and the servers are normal, increase the number of WU's allowed by one day's worth for each day of uptime on the servers.

And yes absolutely, the reputation of the project is that it allows people from all over the world to participate so long as they have a computer that meets the minimal requirements and an internet connection. 150,000 users who turn in 1 WU per day is a POWERFUL amount of work. 10 users who turn in 1,000 WUs a day are piddling by comparison

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150,000 users who turn in 1 WU per day is a POWERFUL amount of work. 10 users who turn in 1,000 WUs a day are piddling by comparison

If that were so, it would be true. But it's not so.

Taking the Scarecrow's data of 19 December, and basing my calculations on active users (those with an RAC > 1):

At the bottom end, there are 102,748 users with an RAC between 1 and 99. They represent 68.4 % of the active users, and contribute 5.8 % towards the total daily RAC.

At the top end, there are 82 users with an RAC > 30,000. They represent 0.0546 % of the active users, and contribute 9.7 % towards the total daily RAC.

Between them, there are 47,424 users with an RAC between 100 and 29,999. They represent 31.6 % of the active users, and contribute 84.5 % towards the total daily RAC.

I conclude that:

Over one hundred thousand little guys contribute ... little.

Less than 100 big guys contribute ... almost twice as much as 100,000 little guys.

Most of the work is done by around 50,000 hobbyists.

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All this rationing talk and fairness for work units, or my computer is old and yours is new is totaly rubbish. For crying out loud, when your computer asks for stinking work you either get it or not. Has nothing to do with what the hell your RAC is or what kind of computer your running.

Before the servers started crapping out and the 3day outage started I ran a .75 day cache and never ran out of work. I have a 3 day cache now and quess what? Out of the 3 machines I run seti on, the i7 usually ran out first. the old p4 second and then the mac. Do I care no,I do other projects when it happens.

Matt has stated that 3 day outages will be back for who knows how long. So if you dont have a 3 day cache at least, Dont be crying you cant get work for your one work unit a day machine.

And that is MHO.

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[/quote]

Old James

So if you dont have a 3 day cache at least, Dont be crying you cant get work for your one work unit a day machine.

Getting it actually in is another thing. Downloading the last 8 with blistering speeds of 0.46KB and 1.12KB/sec. Not going to work. Been doing that all day long.

Oh and before anyone blames my ISP, I have 50Mbit down/5Mbit up. Not the problem on my side, mate. :P

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So if you dont have a 3 day cache at least, Dont be crying you cant get work for your one work unit a day machine.

Getting it actually in is another thing. Downloading the last 8 with blistering speeds of 0.46KB and 1.12KB/sec. Not going to work. Been doing that all day long.

Oh and before anyone blames my ISP, I have 50Mbit down/5Mbit up. Not the problem on my side, mate. :P

Fired up, Tornado, which had been turned off the last week, and after installing
the new improved apps (Thank you JG) asked for work. It took 2 minutes and 35 secands to download 21 work units.

Make of that what you will.

BTW, that's a four day cache on Tornado.

Maybe I have missed the point in my old age, but I hear & read about all of this bickering concerning the fairness of obtaining WUs and whether or not someone has enough cache during the 3-day downtime or for any time period for that matter. What I don't hear or see is anyone suggesting that people increase the size of their cache by increasing the number of days of processing to hold on their machine. One of the things I did many moons ago when I was a SINGLE LITTLE machine, can't remember what it was but it was prior to a Pent II, dial-up, and took several days to do ONE wu, compared to what is out there today, was to increase the 'Maintain enough work for an additional x days' option, which is located in the NETWORK area under 'When and how BOINC uses your computer' in an individual's account page. As far as I know the upper limit is still 10 days.

If one were to increase the number of days under this option, they should have enough to hold them over. I realize that it might take a bit longer, for those of us that do not have the optimal capabilities to d/l the data to your machine(s), but with patience being the operative word, and your machine is connected; you will get the addtional WUs.

Even before I got DSL I never was at a point where I didn't have at least one WU, except when there was an extended outage, and back then extended outages went on for months, not like the small one we recently had.


BTW... HOW BOUT THOSE BIRDS.... GO EAGLES!!!!

So if you dont have a 3 day cache at least, Dont be crying you cant get work for your one work unit a day machine.

Getting it actually in is another thing. Downloading the last 8 with blistering speeds of 0.46KB and 1.12KB/sec. Not going to work. Been doing that all day long.

Oh and before anyone blames my ISP, I have 50Mbit down/5Mbit up. Not the problem on my side, mate. :P

Of course it's not on your side. It's the pipe from the hill.

I am not quite sure that some folks realize that the speed of your internet connection has very little or nothing to do with your ability to connect to Seti or to download work from it. Unless everything is clear at Seti, in which case your connection may be the weakest link.

But if the bandwidth is saturated, as it is right now, and the limitation is at the Seti servers, you can have the fastest connection in the world and it won't increase your chances of connecting, or the speed of downloading what you may get issued.

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

you are all lucky as far as internet speed goe's here in the uk we have the British telecom it siad i get upto 10 mb but it best is 1.8 m.b and its drops down to 500 bytes sometimes

you are all lucky as far as internet speed goe's here in the uk we have the British telecom it siad i get upto 10 mb but it best is 1.8 m.b and its drops down to 500 bytes sometimes

If you can, and I know their cable doesn't reach all parts of the UK, go to Virgin. I'm on 20Mb and that's what I get, testing to UK servers. Last time I tested to SF got >18Mb.

you are all lucky as far as internet speed goe's here in the uk we have the British telecom it siad i get upto 10 mb but it best is 1.8 m.b and its drops down to 500 bytes sometimes

If you can, and I know their cable doesn't reach all parts of the UK, go to Virgin. I'm on 20Mb and that's what I get, testing to UK servers. Last time I tested to SF got >18Mb.

Agreed. I pay for a 10Mb service from Virgin and I get 9.5Mb on average. While not the cheapest out there, I like the reliability of the service. The only problem with it having all coming down the same cable, if it does go down I lose broadband, TV and phone. Some places now offer a 50Mb service and I also know in Bournemouth a company has installed a fibre network in the existing sewers, and offer a 100Mb service (Think it's called Cable City, but don't quote me on that).

Giz.

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A proud GPU User Server Donor!

you are all lucky as far as internet speed goe's here in the uk we have the British telecom it siad i get upto 10 mb but it best is 1.8 m.b and its drops down to 500 bytes sometimes

If you can, and I know their cable doesn't reach all parts of the UK, go to Virgin. I'm on 20Mb and that's what I get, testing to UK servers. Last time I tested to SF got >18Mb.

Agreed. I pay for a 10Mb service from Virgin and I get 9.5Mb on average. While not the cheapest out there, I like the reliability of the service. The only problem with it having all coming down the same cable, if it does go down I lose broadband, TV and phone. Some places now offer a 50Mb service and I also know in Bournemouth a company has installed a fibre network in the existing sewers, and offer a 100Mb service (Think it's called Cable City, but don't quote me on that).

Giz.

Another option, is zen internet zen.co.uk they also do fibre upto 40Gb, you do need BT phone.

...

At the top end, there are 82 users with an RAC > 30,000. They represent 0.0546 % of the active users, and contribute 9.7 % towards the total daily RAC.
...

Whoa! Only 82 Cruncher do 10% of all Work on SETI?

...and i'm one of this addicted Cruncher. LOL

Helli

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A loooong time ago: First Credits after SETI@home Restart

If there needs to be a limit, then the only thing that seems fair to me is to do it per host, not per user.

David (a low-end-of-the-range hobbyist)

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

DSL speed?

I have DSL light, 384/64 kbit/s or 48/8 KB/s, you could imagine what this is for a 'problem' to feed my ~ 70,000 and ~ 20,000 S@h-RAC machines with enough WUs?

I can't get more here in my village..

:-(

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