PCMech BOINC DC teams

[PilotinCommand]

Hello PCMechers,

Since distributed computing (DC) is quitte popular at the PCMech forum I thought I'd join some PCMech DC teams to support PCMech. However, I only found the Folding and Seti teams wherein PCMech is active. I've been active in the Folding@Home project for PCMech and ran Seti Classic (and since a short while Seti/BOINC), but also other DC, BOINC based, projects.

I've switched completely to the BOINC platform when it comes to DC. So no more Folding for me, cause unfortunatly Folding@Home is not yet setup for the BOINC platform. When I was searching for PCMech teams at several DC, BOINC based, projects, I couldn't find any.

I can imagine other PCMech (BOINC using) members had the same problem when trying to join PCMech at DC projects.
So to facilitate this, I added the PCMech teams to the various DC projects based on the BOINC platform. EXCEPT FOR THE SETI/BOINC PROJECT, which is allready up and running under the name ALF Hunters of PCMECH. And except for the

Details:

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SETI@HOME/BOINC

Website/project URL:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

PCMECH Team URL:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_...p?teamid=31369
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I didn't find any other teams with the PCMech name in it, at the following projects. So those are the ones I added PCMech to. If for some reason there was allready a PCMech team at one of the mentioned projects which I didn't pick up during the initial search; let me know, then I'll delete the team I created.

Details:

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ROSETTA@HOME

Website/project URL:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta

PCMECH Team URL:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/te...hp?teamid=1508

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CLIMATE PREDICTION.NET

Website/project URL:
http://www.climateprediction.net

PCMECH Team URL:
http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cp...hp?teamid=3991

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EINSTEIN@Home

Website/project URL:
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

PCMECH Team URL:
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_di...hp?teamid=4826

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LHC

Website/project URL:
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/

PCMECH Team URL:
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/team_display.php?teamid=1731

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PREDICTOR@HOME

Website/project URL:
http://predictor.scripps.edu/

PCMECH Team URL:
http://predictor.scripps.edu/team_di...hp?teamid=2605

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WORLD COMMUNITY GRID

Website/project URL:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org

PCMECH Team URL:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/te...mId=8ZRKFB9WP1

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For those interested in the above, join one or more projects/PCMech teams Installation registration instructions can be found at the BOINC website and at the project websites.

For those not familiar with ditributed computing, in short:

- Importance: Supporting scientific research by donating the computing power from the average PC('s)/laptop(s) to those research projects that require lots of data processing power. These projects range from finding cures for deseases to helping to calculate calibration of the 27KM particle accelerator/collider, LHC.

- Role of society: Downloading the programs that make an average PC/laptop able to voluntary help process data in its idle periods.

- Competition: Those interested in statistics and those having a competitive mindset will probably like DC even more. Every project keeps a record of your processed and send back results and creates a ranking.

More information can be found @ http://boinc.berkeley.edu .

If you have any questions or suggestions, reply, PM me, or mail me.
Hope to see some of you join the BOINC teams.

Hopefully we can reinforce the DC reputation of PCMech over more projects. Offcourse the Folding Team is doing excellent allready with their 68th place in the F@H rankings.

Greetings,

PiC

[PilotinCommand]

Here's a little update from me.

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It's been a week since the teams were created. No one of PCMech joined so far. This is consistent with the poll which, if representative for the whole PCMech community, shows BOINC is not yet being used much by PCMech members. So I'd like to encourage people to join; not only because BOINC is the future of distributed computing and it's the easiest way to participate in more then one DC project. But also to team-up and make PCMech a runner up in the rankings and most important make contributions to scientific research.

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Approval of the PCMech BOINC teams has been given by the PCMech staff. I received word of Pam123 a couple of days ago, the teams are good to go. Also check these threads for the approval:
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=148514
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=148512

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Looking at the poll, most people running a DC client are members of the Folding@Home project. As I myself having participated in the PCMech team Folding team, I know it's a strong team and fun "sub"community of PCMech. However since I heard of BOINC I'm hooked to BOINC based projects. And I am eagerly awaiting Folding to be able to work on the BOINC platform. So I did some research and here's what I found out (maybe some of you allready know this, nevertheless it's interesting).

Between February and July 2005 a beta client was available for testing purposes (reference). Unfortunatly I didn't know of the existence of the beta test phase during that period, so I didn't participate. Since July the Folding people at Stanford have been busy correcting and fixing stuff in the F@H-BOINC beta client. And according to these forum threads [thread1, thread2] , in the week of the 21st of December 2005 there should be a public beta client. However this statement was immediatly corrected and no beta client has been available so far. But it looks like, a beta client will become available in the near future. Nothing has been confirmed by the Folding developers, however.

The plan is that both the classic Folding client and the F@H-BOINC client will stay/become operational. Whereas SETI for example stopped their classic client and switched completely to the BOINC client.

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Every once in a while I'll give an update via this thread. If you want to stay up to date just subscribe to the thread to receive notifications.

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Till next time and I hope I'll see you soon on one or more of the new BOINC PCMech teams.

PilotinCommand

[doctorgonzo]

I'm a BOINC participant, and I am a member of another PC Mech CPDN team:

http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cp...php?teamid=871

[PilotinCommand]

Hi Doctorgonzo,

Finally someone running BOINC Unforunatly I didn't pick you up in my initial search at the CPDN project. How to solve this conflict... haven't got a clue. I've send you a PM to discuss this further.

PiC

[enhanced08]

I think that most people who fold are dedicated folders and switching to BOINC will only become an option when F@H releases this port. I have noticed that other forums have a bunch of DC teams and all of which are very strong in the stats. The only difference in the 'mech and other forums is the number of active members. Here most people come to get help and leave while other forums people tend to stay longer thus becomming part of one of their DC projects.

The 3 main DC projects pcmech has been involved with (As far as I can tell) are: Seti, RC5-72, and Folding.

Come on guys, lets help someone! Where's the holiday spirit?

[David M]

I feel like an idiot asking this..but what is BOINC an acronym for? Maybe this is part of the problem? Nobody has explained what BOINC means.

[doctorgonzo]

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. It's software that can be used by any distributed computing project as its foundation. That way, the projects need only concern themselves with the actual computation of whatever they are trying to accomplish. BOINC takes care of everything else (accounts, file transfers, statistics, commands, those things).

[David M]

I am not a computer expert so perhaps someone could explain in newbie language what this means?

I do Folding@Home by the way. How will this change the way I do FAH?

[doctorgonzo]

Well, before BOINC, every distributed computing project had to start from scratch. The designers not only had to code the actual computation, but they had to code the network activities, they had to set up the backend servers to handle traffic, they had to code user accounts, they had to code user statistics if they wanted them, they had to code error handlers, they had to code reports...basically, they had to do everything themselves. So with every distributed computing project, developers basically reinvented the wheel.

The developers of BOINC realized that a lot of this stuff is common to all DC projects: all DC projects have to upload/download data and program files to the clients, all projects have user accounts, almost all have statistics, and so on. So BOINC takes care of all of this common stuff, which allows DC developers to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of the computations themselves. They didn't have to worry about coding network stuff and accounts; they could focus on writing the code that looks for E.T. or models climate. That makes it easier for people to develop DC projects.

This allows for some side benefits too, like consistent work credit statistics. Statistics in BOINC are computed by how much time is actually spent crunching numbers, not by "workunits" or any other arbitrary divisions. After all, depending on the project, some work pieces may take longer to computer than others. Also, BOINC allows developers to fine tune which clients get what work. Say you have certain workunits that can only be crunched on computers with 512MB of memory or more; BOINC will ensure that only clients with that much memory will get those units. Updating the core components also becomes automated: if SETI comes out with an updated client, or even an entirely new project executable that does something the old SETI software didn't do, BOINC will automatically download it and use it. Finally, BOINC allows users to attach to more than one project and divide their computer time however they see fit. You can attach to both CPDN and SETI, for example, and split your computing time 50/50 between them. Or 90/10. Or whatever else you want. BOINC takes care of this for you. Being involved with multiple project means that even if one project is down or out of work, your computer will still be doing something useful for another project.

When FAH switches to BOINC, not much will change in how it works. You will have to download the BOINC software and attach to FAH, and then BOINC will handle downloading workunits, updating FAH software, and so forth. Statistics might change, but since I'm not involved with FAH I don't know about that aspect.

[PilotinCommand]

Hi,

I'm a BOINC participant, and I am a member of another PC Mech CPDN team: http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cp...php?teamid=871

I've stopped the PCMech.com Climate Prediction team I created, because of an allready existing one. The existing team is called Climate Predictors of PCMech and can be reached via this link:
http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cp...php?teamid=871
(the initial post of this thread will be updated and will be the place where all BOINC teams of PCMech.com are listed)

I feel like an idiot asking this..but what is BOINC an acronym for? Maybe this is part of the problem? Nobody has explained what BOINC means.

Now, I feel like an idiot for not explaining it in the first place in the initial post.
Doctorgonzo nailed it exactly. Here the concept of BOINC is explained in more detail.

I am not a computer expert so perhaps someone could explain in newbie language what this means? I do Folding@Home by the way. How will this change the way I do FAH?

I've attached a graphical representation of the "Classic" way of Distributed Computing and the new one via BOINC. In short what BOINC allows the user to do is:
- run multiple DC projects
- and manage them with only 1 application, called BOINC.


PilotinCommand

[PilotinCommand]

If everybody agrees we should make this thread a "clean" one, meaning that updates and notifications about new BOINC projects and other posts of significance can be posted here.

And lets do the normal BOINC chit-chat and Q&A over here at this thread:
Join the team (http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=148512)

Hopefully the information provided about BOINC in this forum is better structured this way, opposed to chit-chat and structured information through one another.

Thanks in advance,

PilotinCommand

[PilotinCommand]

Update pcmech BOINC dc teams

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A new PCMech team has been created at the SIMAP (Similarity Matrix of Proteins) project.

SIMAP

Website/project URL:
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/

PCMECH Team URL:
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsim...php?teamid=185


A discription of this German based project:

Today, protein sequence comparison is the most powerful tool in computational biology for characterizing protein sequences because of the enormous amount of information that is preserved throughout the evolutionary process. SIMAP is a public database of pre-calculated protein similarities that plays a key role in many bioinformatics methods. It contains about all currently published protein sequences and is continuously updated. The computational effort for keeping SIMAP up-to-date is constantly increasing. Please help to update SIMAP by calculating protein similarities on your computer. The computing power you donate supports manifold biological research projects that make use of SIMAP data.

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Did you know that the "World Community Grid" project, actually consists of more than just 1 project. Currently there are 2 "sub"projects active in this project:
- FightAIDS@Home
- Human Proteome Folding

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For those stats-fanatics, here are some stats pages concerning BOINC projects, you might like (also accumulative stats from all BOINC projects):

- BOINC Synergy
- BOINC Stats
- BOINC Combined Statistics

There are more out there, but these three are the most user friendly, reliable and complete.

If you want to publish your up-to-date BOINC stats in signatures, website etc. visit Boinc.mundayweb.com.

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While we are on the subject "stats" it might be helpfull to explain a little bit about how stats from BOINC projects work. It speaks for itself that every serious DC project grants credits to it's paricipants. This concept originated from the classic Seti@Home project. It wasn't hard to compare your stats to another seti user. However it becomes more difficult to compare your Seti stats with stats of i.e. a participant in the Folding@Home project. This issue isn't a problem among BOINC projects. When you've done work for BOINC project 1 you can compare the along coming granted credits with BOINC project 2 because all credits are being exported in a standard unit called a cobblestone.

Important for the participant is to realize that projects "talk" to each other via the so called process of Cross Project Identification, or CPID. In short it's a automatically generated unique string of characters which makes it possible to identify you as a unique user of a BOINC project, since usernames can be shared among others. BOINC projects interact with each other to exchange and compare these CPID's and synchronize so that every project contains the same CPID. The CPID is always displayed at every account page of a BOINC participant.
NOW THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR BOINC PARTICIPANTS IS: ALWAYS SIGN UP WITH THE SAME E-MAIL ADRESS. Because the initial e-mail adress used during sign-up at a BOINC project is the only unique characteristic of a BOINC account on which the CPID depends.

Just 1 sidenote: After sign-up at a BOINC project you might notice that your account page doesn't display the CPID, which you've got for all other projects, richt away. The process of synchonizing the CPID between projects jsut takes time. So just do some work and give the new BOINC project a month or so to get in sync with the other projects. The duration depends a bit on server capacity from the project, I believe. During this period you might notice that your CPID will change a couple of times, don't be affraid any credits will be lost in the process, it's only your temporarly CPID that changes.

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Hope you can all put this info to use and join up with the (several) BOINC teams.

Till next time,

PilotinCommand

[pam123]

Thanks for the update!

[PilotinCommand]

My pleasure. I just had hoped I could provide some info about Folding's plans and a possible BOINC application. But I didn't get around to that, I'll do some research and try to figure out if there are some efforts underway from Stanford. I'll post back when I've got some info on that.

PiC

[enhanced08]

I can tell ya that about all the info you will find about it is that infact they are working on it. Stanford is very quiet about the projects its working on such as SMp support, GPU folding and ofcoarse BOINC.

[PilotinCommand]

Thanks, for the input. So in short, nothing new on that front. Hope there will be something going public on the short term. Well, we'll see.

PiC

[PilotinCommand]

Update pcmech BOINC DC teams

Hello everybody,

Here's a little update concerning BOINC projects.


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The BBC recently started a climate prediction project which is closely related to the original "CPDN" project. It's basicly the same model that's being used for the original climate pediction project.

What the BBC is trying to show here is, how distributed computing works and how it can benefit science and consequently the rest of the world. In this case the project specifically focusses on climate changes. For those that can receive BBC4; May 2006 there should be some sort of program on that channel concerning this climate prediction project.

It's a great project for those that want to get started with DC (distributed computing) via BOINC. The installation procedure is explained very crisp and shouldn't cause any problems. Keep in mind that the work units take a lot of time to process (more info about PC requirement etc. is available here).
So give it a try you might like it, it's a great introduction to DC.

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RECRUITING CRUNCHERS and LEAD CRUNCHERS

Since I'm allready running 8 projects I can't lead any more teams in a good manner. If I would take on more projects some work units would not be able to make their deadlines in time and will therefor not or partially count.

So next to the fact I'm encouraging people to join the allready existing PCMECH BOINC teams I'm also looking for people that can lead future new teams under the PCMECH.com flag. You will however have to contact PAM123 to be granted permission to lead/set-up a BOINC team. She keeps track of all distributed computing activity concerning PCMECH.

"So what are you asking of me?" I hear you think. Well it's very simple actually. You set-up a team, register it as PCMECH.COM and you're automatically the team-leader/founder. Place an URL to the project and team URL back here in this thread. Encourage people to join and just make sure you're an active participant for the long term.

So Pcmechers, come on and join/lead a team. There are still projects wherein PCMECH isn't active, give it a shot.
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If you're looking for more visual statistics, check this stats-site out.
http://boinc.netsoft-online.com
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That's it for now. See you in one of the teams or otherwise on the forum. If you've got some feedback or something interesting to report, don't hesitate and post it or PM me.

'till next time,

PiC

[~LP]

Which Boinc projects is the team most active in? Is there any in particular that
the team would prefer to run, over the others?

Also, are you going to start a team for Quantum Monte Carlo at Home?

[PilotinCommand]

Seti is the most popular BOINC based DC project among PCmech members, partly due to the fact Seti has been around for quitte a long time and had allready a large members base before the BOINC era. Climate Prediction is also popular.

I just added a PCMech team at the Quantum Monte Carlo @ Home project. Here are the details:

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Quantum Monte Carlo @ Home

Website/project URL:
http://qah.uni-muenster.de

PCMECH Team URL:
http://qah.uni-muenster.de/team_display.php?teamid=353

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Be mindfull of the fact that joining this project has to be done via the BOINC manager instead of the "usuall" website-registration proces. Here are some instructions: http://qah.uni-muenster.de/usernotes.php

Thanks for your help LP. I allready noticed you joined the SIMAP project.

Keep on crunchin'

PiC

[~LP]

I hadn't run Boinc projects for a little while, but I restarted some and switched all my points over.

I don't like Rosetta because of the lack of a quorum (unless they changed it), and most of the time Seti's server is down. I just tried to connect and got nothing.
So I set some Linux towers to Simap, QMC, Predictor, and CP.



edit- I managed to connect to Seti.

[PilotinCommand]

Great to have you on the team. By the way, I see you're new around here on the forum, welcome. I think you'll be surprised to see how different (in a positive way) the attitude is of the PCMech members.

A lot of PCMech members are still crunching for the Folding@Home project (not BOINC based), that's why there is a relative small amount of PCMech members that have joined up on the BOINC teams. I believe PCMech is still a runner up on the rankings at the Folding@Home project so I can understand that. However if you look at the growth of the active CPU's at the Folding@Home project, you'll see it's declining. I think it's because people new to distributed computing are choosing for BOINC based projects because of its variety. I have 2 (sometimes 3) active PC's running and I know I will never become number 1 on the rankings, I just like to run a divers variety of projects and support science in my insignificant way. However a lot of little things together can create a large thing, I think. So I hope more PCMech members will join or Folding@Home will add a BOINC client to crunch workunits. I'll definitely give it a try when the Folding people at Stanford add this BOINC client.

PiC

[~LP]

Originally Posted by PilotinCommand By the way, I see you're new around here on the forum, welcome. I think you'll be surprised to see how different (in a positive way) the attitude is of the PCMech members. PiC

Yes, I'm new here.

I really hope that this place is different. I'm really getting weary of the "attitudes" shown on most computer forums.

I build my own towers, but haven't got into the latest stuff yet (SLI, Sata)
The last towers I built were A64's (754's) and a couple Mobiles (socket A).
At some point I want to venture into that new hardware world, and I'll probably need some advice.

[pam123]

Originally Posted by ~LP Yes, I'm new here. I really hope that this place is different. I'm really getting weary of the "attitudes" shown on most computer forums. I build my own towers, but haven't got into the latest stuff yet (SLI, Sata) The last towers I built were A64's (754's) and a couple Mobiles (socket A). At some point I want to venture into that new hardware world, and I'll probably need some advice.

Let me welcome you to PCMech as well.
Read through the rules and make yourself at home.