A thought on WU quota

AnRM
AnRM
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RE: RE: Your are quite

Message 28295 in response to message 28291

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Quote:



Your are quite right, I don't actually know, and yes some official word would be good. .


>Two things that I've mentioned in other threads.....
First, you are an excellent Moderator, Mike and
Second, I'm more annoyed about the lack of communication by the Admins then I am about the 'curse of 32'...they leave good people like yourself twisting in the wind, trying to answer quetions with guesses etc. What is the problem here? Why all the secrecy? Rosetta has had its share of troubles too but the way they handle it is to be upfront and discuss them with their community. Rosetta solicits help from their group and it makes most people very patient and wanting to help etc. It's this sense of community that seems to eluded E@H lately. IMHO dismissive 'end of story' answers by Admins. to honest questions seems to indicate a lack of regard for participants, intended or not. I have always considered E@H to be the 'Gold Standard' BOINC project and I really hope it gets its lustre back soon....Cheers, Rog.

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: First, you are an

Message 28296 in response to message 28295

Quote:
First, you are an excellent Moderator, Mike


Thank you kindly.... :-)

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Second, I'm more annoyed about the lack of communication by the Admins then I am about the 'curse of 32'...they leave good people like yourself twisting in the wind, trying to answer quetions with guesses etc. What is the problem here? Why all the secrecy? Rosetta has had its share of troubles too but the way they handle it is to be upfront and discuss them with their community. Rosetta solicits help from their group and it makes most people very patient and wanting to help etc. It's this sense of community that seems to eluded E@H lately. IMHO dismissive 'end of story' answers by Admins. to honest questions seems to indicate a lack of regard for participants, intended or not. I have always considered E@H to be the 'Gold Standard' BOINC project and I really hope it gets its lustre back soon....Cheers, Rog.


Points taken, and well spoken.
Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

history
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Mike; Thanks for the

Mike; Thanks for the comments. We all wish you had more information. Einstein lost two more of my rigs on Sunday. They both ran dry and the server was not going to communicate with one in less that an hour and 20 minutes, and the other in over 3 hours. I can appreciate the project wanting to preserve the server assets to service a large client base. It appears that the optimized apps are a two edged sword. I can crunch the optimized apps and then run dry and waste cpu cycles, or I can reload Einstein and run the original "spinning wheel" code and reduce my credit by 75%. I am wondering if the optimized apps haven't revealed several critical errors in the projects original design? Regardless, there is still an open invitation for all the Einsteiners with dry rigs, bad attitudes, or who already crunch Rosetta to join the "Curse of 32" team over there.

Regards-tweakster

Scott Brown
Scott Brown
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I appreciate the (very


I appreciate the (very legitimate) frustrations with work quotas and lowered communications of late, but I would like to point out two things:

First, in the U.S. we are at the end of the college academic year. While I am sure that the admins are devoted to the project thoroughly, let us not forget that they are also likely dealing with final papers and exams (and the annoying students who pester professors for grades and grade changes, etc. -- one of the least enjoyable parts of this job, at least for me). Hopefully when the summer truly starts in the US academic world (another week or two typically), the admins might be back in a fuller communication role.

Second, BOINC is inherently designed for multi-project use, and I applaud tweakster and CDNgeezer for their urging users in that direction in repsonse to the current issues on Einstein (Indeed, I have always participated in multiple projects on all of my machines). I, however, respectfully disagree with their choice of Rosetta as their backup project. Rosetta has noble goals and a very involved and resposive set of admins. However, the style of moderation of their forums is considerably different (posts are frequently moved or rearranged, censorship of posts--someitmes appropriate, many times IMHO not--is higher than on any other BOINC-based project, etc.). Put simply, the "frankness" of discussion that Mike Hewson (who serves excellently in the moderator role here) has expressed appreciation for may well be moderated out of existence at Rosetta. The choice of project participation is an individual decision, but I encourage anyone experiencing the current work quota problem to consider many of the other scientifically worthy BOINC projects as an alternative to idle CPUs.

DanNeely
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Scott: good point about the

Scott: good point about the end of term workload on the staff. One other possiblity that's occured to me is that with s4 a month and a half from completion and s5 not being ready until "mid summer", the staff's decided that since s4 will complete before s5 is ready to start that rather than spending several grand on a new server the money would be better spent hiring someone to write a very fast science app that crunches each work unit several times larger or computationally deeper* than the s4 app does. IOW, make each work unit 5x larger and use a 5x faster science app to run it. Server load will stay the same as with the old app, but but they'll be able to do significantly more science. A choice of priorities a wholeheartedly agree with.

AnRM
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>Scott, you have a point

>Scott, you have a point about the academic year issue....however, that arguement would also apply to the Rosetta crew and they have not abandoned their community.
>With great respect, I have to take issue with the suggested acts of 'censorship' at Rosetta.....I really don't think it is much different that any other project, really. Maybe I missed something somewhere......the point is, though, that any communication is better than silence....Cheers, Rog.

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: Scott: good point about

Message 28301 in response to message 28299

Quote:
Scott: good point about the end of term workload on the staff.


They also had major LIGO conferences to prepare for and clean up from, planning work for the advanced LIGO design based on experience to date ( they have found out quite alot in this new field! ), significant worries with the detectors ( unknown low frequency noise, crappy triple-lock statistics .... ), fundholder hearings to justify their work ( they were approved! ) plus whatever else I have no idea about. Ben Owen did mention a few weeks ago that 'we've all been running full steam for a while'. This is of course yet more apologistic guesswork from me.... :-)

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One other possiblity that's occured to me is that with s4 a month and a half from completion and s5 not being ready until "mid summer", the staff's decided that since s4 will complete before s5 is ready to start that rather than spending several grand on a new server the money would be better spent hiring someone to write a very fast science app that crunches each work unit several times larger or computationally deeper* than the s4 app does. IOW, make each work unit 5x larger and use a 5x faster science app to run it. Server load will stay the same as with the old app, but but they'll be able to do significantly more science. A choice of priorities a wholeheartedly agree with.


Curious! That hadn't occured to me. I'd thought it might have been intense focus to spruce up the detector issues for the remainder of S5 - after all no amount of signal processing post run is going to save crap data.
For myself, I am simply ( stupidly? ) happy to be involved in whatever capacity for what I see as a truly historic enterprise, and I am chuffed that at a time of virtual world war peoples from many countries have something very sensible to huddle around. So I am rather bland on the WU quota for instance - though I do actually respect the views of others, if only to encourage and engage their participation for the science result ( forgive me if that sounds terribly callous ) ..... :-)
Hey Mike! Enough of the sermons, already! :-)
Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

RandyC
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RE: Scott: good point about

Message 28302 in response to message 28299

Quote:
Scott: good point about the end of term workload on the staff. One other possiblity that's occured to me is that with s4 a month and a half from completion and s5 not being ready until "mid summer", the staff's decided that since s4 will complete before s5 is ready to start that rather than spending several grand on a new server the money would be better spent hiring someone to write a very fast science app that crunches each work unit several times larger or computationally deeper* than the s4 app does. IOW, make each work unit 5x larger and use a 5x faster science app to run it. Server load will stay the same as with the old app, but but they'll be able to do significantly more science. A choice of priorities a wholeheartedly agree with.

Dan,

While I certainly applaude getting the most [science] bang for the [cpu cycle] buck, it might be worthwhile to review all the turmoil over at Seti Enhanced, before upsetting the applecart too much.

Seti Classic Final Total: 11446 WU.

groundhog
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Argh, I don't believe it.

Argh, I don't believe it. Reached daily quorum on a PentiumIII 866. Why do they make the WUs so short? 38:XX minutes/WU.

Greetings groundhog


Scott Brown
Scott Brown
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RE: >Scott, you have a

Message 28304 in response to message 28300

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>Scott, you have a point about the academic year issue....however, that arguement would also apply to the Rosetta crew and they have not abandoned their community.

This is true, but the academic(non-research) workload at a mid-size state univ. such as UWM (where Bruce Allen is located) tends to be considerably higher than at a large research one school such as Washington (Rosetta's home) (e.g., Washington is probably on a 2 and 2 or 2 and 1 teaching load whereas UWM is more likely on a 3 and 2 or even a 3 and 3 load). Also keep in mind that the Rosetta project is almost certainly much more well funded with a larger staff (as are most of the life science projects) with course buyouts for David Baker likely (I'd be very surprised if he is teaching more than 1 class a semester if even that), and thereby, less affected by the ups and downs of the typical academic year.

Quote:

>With great respect, I have to take issue with the suggested acts of 'censorship' at Rosetta.....I really don't think it is much different that any other project, really. Maybe I missed something somewhere......the point is, though, that any communication is better than silence....Cheers, Rog.

In fairness, I would have to say that I do not know how things are going these days as I haven't really been over at Rosetta for more than a month. However, at that time, posters showing irritation and tone not dissimilar to some of the posts that are near the beginning of this thread were told quite directly to watch their tone (with the threat of the posts being removed made very clear). I agree with you that the admins, David Baker especially, are very active at Rosetta and set a fine example for all BOINC projects. My point was that the moderation style at Rosetta is quite unique, and that due to this difference (i.e., greater management of posts including deletions--which I believe to be censorship in some cases--and rearranging of posts or moving entire threads such that following a discussion over several days could become difficult), persons accustomed to the culture at other BOINC projects might not feel as comfortable there.

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