Rob,

Most communication for Beta occurs either in the NEWS section or the Seti@home Enhanced.

https://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta//forum_index.php

Usually it's the NEWS section. However, you will see there are relatively few over there actively posting so it tends to overflow onto Seti Main where more "lively" discussions occur.

Zalster

Rob,
Most communication for Beta occurs either in the NEWS section or the Seti@home Enhanced.
https://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta//forum_index.php
Usually it's the NEWS section. However, you will see there are relatively few over there actively posting so it tends to overflow onto Seti Main where more "lively" discussions occur.
Zalster

I noticed that; thanks for confirming my impression! I'm slowly getting a hang of it.
Fyi, I just voiced a few small accumulated frustrations from the past week in order to see what kind of feedback I'd get...and what I've learned so far: Patience is a virtue!
Cheers,
Rob :-D

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Well after 2 months of my 3570K rig not crunching due to its data drive crashing and by the time I got the RMA completed and back up running SETI, MB V8 had already been 3 weeks old, so its RAC was down to 4K from 38K running Lunatics MB V7.

Just running plain stock apps this rig had peaked at 28.8K RAC by the end of the 1st week in April.

Now that has steadily dropped in steps since.

I've been trying to get 6 weeks of steady RAC, which by old rights I should have by now, but after the last 4 weeks of sitting at a short 18K step, it now looks to be crashing down again, to 16K this time.

After 6 months of MB V8 I'm now totally convinced that Credit New is fatally screwed beyond hope (and only a mental defective could think otherwise).

Can anyone blame some people heading for greener pastures in other BOINC projects where their power bill goes further or just giving up all together?

The release of an in-mature stock Nvidia OpenCL MB app being dumped on the unsuspecting hasn't helped by a long shot either turning once stable PC's into BSOD or lagged hell which in turn just creates more pendings as more people turn away leaving tasks pending.

I'm sorry, but when will this stupidity stop and when will I hit a zero RAC? :-)

Cheers.

Quick side observations only.

... After 6 months of MB V8 I'm now totally convinced that Credit New is fatally screwed beyond hope (and only a mental defective could think otherwise).

That's pretty much what last year's engineering focussed walkthroughs revealed, though in more technical words, so no argument there.

The release of an in-mature stock Nvidia OpenCL MB app...

Don't know much/anything about the situation there, though can certainly say things are rough right now on the Cuda side as well (IMO). There is light at the end of the (very long) tunnel after probing with Petri's pretty device/situation specific code, and discussing a lot of issues there. We seem to have reached agreement that the codebase reached an impasse, with broken cross platform support, and supporting the wide generalrange of hardware+Oses is going to need new 'proper' approaches. Lots of software engineering and refinement, ground-up, ahead, along with integrating new tools and techniques.

In that light, I suspect the sudden v8 changes had similar effects on the described OpenCL application, probably better in some areas (like VLAR performance) and worse in others (self-scaling/adaptiveness capability and 'nerdy option entropy')

So my guess is that things probably will remain a bit of a cluster all around for some time, though at least learning the hard lessons the hard way, tends to make them stick... necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

---

"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Thankfully my driver version means that I don't get those OpenCL MB tasks. :-)

It's the feedback about them as well as the wingmen aborts/timeouts on those particular tasks (and usually around about their last contact with this project after some years).

I'm looking forward to the new CUDA app/s Jason that I know you won't rush them out the door as those others were. ;-)

Cheers.

Thankfully my driver version means that I don't get those OpenCL MB tasks. :-)

It's the feedback about them as well as the wingmen aborts/timeouts on those particular tasks (and usually around about their last contact with this project after some years).

I'm looking forward to the new CUDA app/s Jason that you won't rush them out the door as those others were. ;-)

Cheers.

I agree. The temptation arose probing/experimenting with some of the contributed performance code over the last week. Things looked very good in some respects, but very situation specific (so complex and fragile). Something that showed the possibilities, but showed all the design weaknesses we largely inherited from however many years of bandaid patching.

Time to rip the bandaids off, apply medical maggots to remove the dead flesh, and build something new from whatever remains.

---

"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

I see. Well, is there at least any consensus about possible solutions? Or is that also a point of contention?

Jason looked at what Credit New was supposed to do, and what it actually does. He then made some suggestions as to how it could do what it's meant to instead of what it's doing.
Un-fortunately David Anderson doesn't consider it broken (even though it doesn't do what it's supposed to), so he doesn't see any need to fix it.
Hence the disdain (verging on intense dislike) for Credit New amongst the general population.

. . Loathing seems not too strong a word LOL

Stephen

.

Mind you, the whitepaper on CreditNew is ok. it's just the implementation that is lacking ;)

I never understood why people care about some arbitrary computer numbers anyway. Must be another case of 'mine is bigger than yours'.
What I care about is WHEN you do something like that you should do it mathematically sound and not end up with a bunch of spaghettis that would do well in a chaos engine.

And yes, Jord, David will listen if you present stuff the right way.

. . I think for a lot of people there is no measure of how much they are contributing to the project and CreditNew is the only feedback they get about it. And it peeves people when it is so inconsistent and variable for no sound reason. As has been said before, you can't buy anything with the credits awared to you but it helps get a warm fuzzy feeling when you can see a number and know that is how much you have contributed to the cause. IF it is a valid meaningful measure.

Stephen

.

Mind you, the whitepaper on CreditNew is ok. it's just the implementation that is lacking ;)

I never understood why people care about some arbitrary computer numbers anyway. Must be another case of 'mine is bigger than yours'.
What I care about is WHEN you do something like that you should do it mathematically sound and not end up with a bunch of spaghettis that would do well in a chaos engine.

And yes, Jord, David will listen if you present stuff the right way.

. . I think for a lot of people there is no measure of how much they are contributing to the project and CreditNew is the only feedback they get about it. And it peeves people when it is so inconsistent and variable for no sound reason. As has been said before, you can't buy anything with the credits awared to you but it helps get a warm fuzzy feeling when you can see a number and know that is how much you have contributed to the cause. IF it is a valid meaningful measure.

Stephen

.

Have been able to connect a few dots lately, with respect to the intent for proper estimation and scheduling control, and similar discussions that arise in quantum versus Newtonian mechanics (being also probability/statistically based versus classical control oriented).

Dogma/beliefs play a part in obscuring real issues, such that both approaches should ultimately converge on more or less optimal solutions (for that estimation and control), with 'proper credit' being a desirable side effect.

David's recent acknowledgement via Boinc email threads, that modelling/simulation of what is actually going on was needed, In my mind was the right direction (if a little late). I responded there in the affirmative, only to indicate that some of what he was saying may not be entirely as theoretical as he may have thought. Such subtle seeds don't tend to garner immediate reactions, and quick fixes aren't the solution here anyway. Considerably refining the model used to better reflect the changing technology is. Fortunately a great deal of time and care down that line can somewhat future-proof the model, rather than have to run around patching things every time some new gizmo is invented.

---

"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Mind you, the whitepaper on CreditNew is ok. it's just the implementation that is lacking ;)

I never understood why people care about some arbitrary computer numbers anyway. Must be another case of 'mine is bigger than yours'.
What I care about is WHEN you do something like that you should do it mathematically sound and not end up with a bunch of spaghettis that would do well in a chaos engine.

And yes, Jord, David will listen if you present stuff the right way.

. . I think for a lot of people there is no measure of how much they are contributing to the project and CreditNew is the only feedback they get about it. And it peeves people when it is so inconsistent and variable for no sound reason. As has been said before, you can't buy anything with the credits awared to you but it helps get a warm fuzzy feeling when you can see a number and know that is how much you have contributed to the cause. IF it is a valid meaningful measure.

Stephen

.

Hence, (now that the WoW Event is concluded), I've resumed my non-crunching stance. RAC is falling again, and will continue to do so until such time as this is properly addressed and corrected. (If I have to, or when it becomes necessary, I will crunch just enough to keep my RAC where I am able to post here. That will be all.)

I hope others follow suit; I know some have... This action is NOT to be construed as being against the SETI Project, Eric, or the staff below Eric.

The more people that stand up and speak out, the sooner something will get done. With the advent of v8 and SoG work, SETI@Home needs as many crunchers as it can get. It only takes one voice to get a movement started, but it takes a group effort to move the mountain.

Even with two EVGA GTX-750TI SC cards and one GTX-760 spread amongst two computers crunching 15 Hours a day, I RECENTLY ONLY broke 12.5 K in RAC! Prior to v8 I was able to hit 18 K RAC on ONE 750TI SC and ONE 760 at 15 Hours a day. I have no figures prior to that for GPU Usage; as prior to having these cards I was solely a CPU cruncher. It took me 7 years to break my first million SETI Credits. Then I got my first GTX-760, and later my first 750TI SC. Now I'm above 8 Million, (almost 9 Million), Credits in three short years of GPU Usage. At that accumulation; I SHOULD have a MUCH HIGHER RAC than I do.

As I've stated before, I'm NOT a credit hound; however, because I'm on SSDI and CANNOT afford my own place, I'm living with my parents. Since dad pays the electricity, I MUST have something to show for the work I do for SETI to my dad. Hitting below 12 K RAC is NOT what I need to show for my efforts. I'd be happy with my RAC of 18 K; but considering that my Einstein crunching yields 89 K RAC in about a month of crunching on two GPUs at 15 Hours a day; there is SOMETHING REALLY wrong here.

I hope this is taken seriously. I hate NOT crunching for SETI. SETI@Home was my first distributed computing project when I joined in 2006. I hope to be a contributor here for more years to come. BUT, we need a fairer Credit System than CreditNew!


TL

---

TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos

"I hope you enjoyed the ride, now you can start screaming as your flaming arse plummets back to earth!"

Who cares? Guppies are the best data to date, it is unfortunate that Nvideas are slow on VLARS.

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"I hope you enjoyed the ride, now you can start screaming as your flaming arse plummets back to earth!"

Who cares? Guppies are the best data to date, it is unfortunate that Nvideas are slow on VLARS.

Slow?

---

To overcome Heisenbergs:
"You can't always get what you want / but if you try sometimes you just might find / you get what you need." -- Rolling Stones

I still say that the Einstein@Home Fixed Credit Model is the one to strive for for SETI@Home. Einstein has FAR more Unit Types that they implement, and each Unit has a Fixed Credit Model.

If I can get to 89 K on two cards crunching 2 Units Each at 15 Hours a day on Einstein; now that I have three cards, I don't know where I'll end up - BUT I know that the same Credit System here would mean that I'd be able to show my dad a fair credit value for work done against the electricity he's paying out for my hobby.

Our last electric bill from California's PG&E was over $600 for one month. Keeping in mind that we have approx 3,400 Sq Ft of house; we have two AC units, (one for downstairs, one for upstairs), two heating units, (again, one for upstairs, one for downstairs), four TVs, (three of them LED/LCD and one CRT), two of which run at any given time throughout the day. ...AND, a pool that the pool sweep and filter system run from 9 AM to 4 PM daily. We've been on CFLs for most of the lighting in the home for 10 years, and are now, (slowly), converting these to LED Bulbs. Lights usually go on in the family room and kitchen area in the evening. Kitchen goes on first around 6 PM to aid in cooking. The family room goes on around 7ish, closer to 8 PM. These lights all go out at 10 PM, and my bedroom and my parents bedroom lights go on for another hour or so. ...AND STILL our bill is over $600.

Join with me in protest of the unfair CreditNew system. Help push SETI@Home to the FAIRER Fixed Credit System that Einstein uses. I've mentioned this before, Jason, (at that time), said he'd look into it and talk with Bernd from Einstein. I've heard NOTHING more since then!

If we join together in protest, perhaps we will be taken more seriously! I want to crunch for SETI, BUT, cannot justify the electric usage with CreditNew granting such low credit for 15 Hours of daily computations on two computers. I know MANY of you have more systems than I; so, I KNOW that if these systems STOP crunching SETI and go elsewhere for ONE MONTH, the powers that be WILL take notice!


TL

---

TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos

"I hope you enjoyed the ride, now you can start screaming as your flaming arse plummets back to earth!"

Who cares? Guppies are the best data to date, it is unfortunate that Nvideas are slow on VLARS.

Slow?

For those of us without the magic application (although SoG does make good time on them compared to the current CUDA apps, SoG on Arecibo WUs are is much faster still).

---

Grant
Darwin NT

If we join together in protest, perhaps we will be taken more seriously! I want to crunch for SETI, BUT, cannot justify the electric usage with CreditNew granting such low credit for 15 Hours of daily computations on two computers. I know MANY of you have more systems than I; so, I KNOW that if these systems STOP crunching SETI and go elsewhere for ONE MONTH, the powers that be WILL take notice!

Seams like your the only one that's bitching about the situation , most people seam to be getting on with things , not like you have a alterior motive have you apart from using seti like FB !

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Life is what you make of it :-)

When i'm good i'm very good , but when i'm bad i'm shi#eloads better ;-) In't I " buttercups " p.m.s.l at authoritie !!;-)

If we join together in protest, perhaps we will be taken more seriously! I want to crunch for SETI, BUT, cannot justify the electric usage with CreditNew granting such low credit for 15 Hours of daily computations on two computers. I know MANY of you have more systems than I; so, I KNOW that if these systems STOP crunching SETI and go elsewhere for ONE MONTH, the powers that be WILL take notice!

Good luck with that idea mate ....

California good weather mmm ever heard of Solar panels ? $7200 a year your bill

This is what you can get for 2 years paying a bill , less our Gov sub's

Add 3 years bills and you get the Battery's and go off grid or stay on and get payed from the Electric Co. when energy is high

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I never understood why people care about some arbitrary computer numbers anyway. Must be another case of 'mine is bigger than yours'.
What I care about is WHEN you do something like that you should do it mathematically sound and not end up with a bunch of spaghettis that would do well in a chaos engine.

. . I think for a lot of people there is no measure of how much they are contributing to the project and CreditNew is the only feedback they get about it. And it peeves people when it is so inconsistent and variable for no sound reason. As has been said before, you can't buy anything with the credits awared to you but it helps get a warm fuzzy feeling when you can see a number and know that is how much you have contributed to the cause. IF it is a valid meaningful measure.

Stephen

The number is really irrelevant. But what is relevant is the relativity, if you will. I spend a couple hundred extra bucks per month on electricity to run these few PCs and keep them cool. I don't mind this, but I do work to maximize the productivity of these machines for the expense incurred. That is my joy in this hobby, as much as contributing to the science.
To be effective in that, I require a measurement system that I can count on to be realistic, reliable and reasonably linear. Otherwise, I'm just spending money and making changes at random. Why bother?

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To be effective in that, I require a measurement system that I can count on to be realistic, reliable and reasonably linear. Otherwise, I'm just spending money and making changes at random. Why bother?

That's why one should not regress to credits for this task.
Look for APR as very first approach. But better plot throughput vs AR curve for different configs and compare them.
Of course it's not too easy approach as single bold number would be. But that's life. Just imagine that one setting could improve VLAR performance but also adds some delays in VHAR processing. How this could be measured with single number especially when VLAR/VHAR ratio is different for each new tape...

To simplify things a little try to use Lunatics PG-set of tasks of different ARs. They short enough and representative enough (for not high-end GPUs though, they are just too fast for this particular set) to use only single number - sum of elapsed time through all tasks as integral performance characteristic.

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SETI apps news
We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them.

That's why one should not regress to credits for this task.

lol. They keep getting used only because they are the only measurement that can be gotten without a bunch of work.

Look for APR as very first approach. But better plot throughput vs AR curve for different configs and compare them.

Unfortunate that there are not good tools out there, for those of us who lack the skills to do this without them.

Of course it's not too easy approach as single bold number would be. But that's life.

Indeed.

Just imagine that one setting could improve VLAR performance but also adds some delays in VHAR processing. How this could be measured with single number especially when VLAR/VHAR ratio is different for each new tape...

Yeah, I totally get that, and while I don't understand that level of math this totally makes sense.

To simplify things a little try to use Lunatics PG-set of tasks of different ARs. They short enough and representative enough (for not high-end GPUs though, they are just too fast for this particular set) to use only single number - sum of elapsed time through all tasks as integral performance characteristic.

Not sure I totally understand what you're getting at here. Will have to try and think that through.
As always, great points, lots to consider here, and I appreciate your taking a few moments to respond ...

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With my other hat on I will make a comment.

If we join together in protest, perhaps we will be taken more seriously! I want to crunch for SETI, BUT, cannot justify the electric usage with CreditNew granting such low credit for 15 Hours of daily computations on two computers. I know MANY of you have more systems than I; so, I KNOW that if these systems STOP crunching SETI and go elsewhere for ONE MONTH, the powers that be WILL take notice!

Q1. Are you here for the science or for the credit?

A1. ???

If the answer is just the credit to justify your electricity bill, then I suggest that you leave and find a better paying project, of which there are many. Creditnew has had an unfavourable introduction, but stirring things up like a traditional Labour trade unionist is not helping.

DID you EVEN read my ENTIRE Post???

If NOT, I suggest you do. This Post of yours is UNCALLED FOR - YOU SH*T STIRRER!!! :-O


TL

---

TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos