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| We have surpassed 1000 hosts on this project.
Thanks to all volunteers who have helped so far! |
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| Project News 05/27/08 |
| Project Status UpdateCurrently P@H is offline. We are in the process of establishing ourselves at the University of Michigan. Our group has just purchased a large computation cluster (1776 cores). We are in the process of interviewing candidates for the 20 open postdoctoral possitions in our group. It does not look like our currently staff will have the resources to run P@H.Periodically we will be creating workunits to test ideas. This will not be happening on a regular basis. For those of you who would like to stay attached please note that any test workunits will have a high probability of failure. |
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| |
| We would like to bring to light the terrible attacks facing
South Africa at this present time. To quote our Vice-Chancellor.
"Diversity is an integral part of UCT's core character - we have more
international students than any other African university. We have
celebrated this on campus and around the world because we know the
value that a diverse campus and society brings. I have no doubt that
UCT will showcase - in this moment of national crisis - its deep
commitment to our shared values of respect for human life and rights."
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| |
| Due to the cooling unit failing on Friday, all machines in our server room were shutdown to prevent catastrophic
failure. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the lost work units and project downtime. |
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| |
| Project re-opened until we get a few hundred more volunteers. Please note - we are still in test mode. Scheduled
powerouts have also been abandoned for
the short-term so now powerouts expected in the near future. |
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| Project News 03/30/08 |
| I've created some test workunits. The tests will answer two questions. First, is the server correctly configured for operations at the University of Michigan. Second, How big a difference is there is results returned from different CPU's and does that difference warrent that Homogeneous Redundancy be turned on. |
|
| Update from sunny Canada |
| I'm writing this over a satellite link from northern Quebec. Air
temperature is currently -20 degrees Centigrade, and the project
is very busy. No forest here, and still no useful work to be done
by APS. After 6 days back in the UK in late March, I'll be in Borneo
so there should be work to do then, provided I can get the application
problems sorted out before leaving. It'll be a satellite link from
there as well, so that's quite important.
More news when I have it. Thanks for standing by... |
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| Project News 02/15/08 |
| We have made the transition to The University of Michigan. The server is still offline. We are still getting settled in our new location. I will try to have weekly status updates. |
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| Status Report |
| Unfortunately more patience is the order of the day. Solving the
problems with the OS X versions of the last application release is
proving more time consuming than I'd expected. Also, commitments
in Canada and Borneo until May are due to begin within days.
Please feel free to contact me through the message boards or by
E-mail about anything you think I may have missed. In the meantime,
happy crunching on your other projects, and I'll be back here as
soon as possible. |
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| Back online |
| We are back online after some several server problems. |
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| Project News 11/02/07 |
| The Brooks Research Group will be relocating to the University of Michigan. The current Predictor@Home site will remain open until December. After that there will be a down time while we transfer people and resources to Ann Arbor Michigan. We hope to be up again some time after January 1, 2008. |
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| Project on holiday |
| The project will remain quiet until mid-November now, as I'm getting
married on Saturday. So I'm, er, a little busy.
Thanks for your patience. If there are any problems in the meantime,
it's probably a good idea to E-mail me directly. |
|
| Lead article in this weeks iSGTW |
| "Secure enough? Re-assessment of the world´s most-used hash function", a description of this project, just appeared in this weeks issue of International Science Grid This Week. |
|
| New client version |
| New version 5.35 of 32-bit and 64-bit Linux as well as 32-bit Windows, fixing some bugs, are available! |
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| Internal Testing, Scheduler Unavailable |
| Some internal tests are being run. So, the scheduler is temporarily
unavailable to those on the Internet. This may cause some access
denied messages to show up in your BOINC manager. |
|
| SciLINC Update |
| When development of the SciLINC project began it had four primary
goals. Edited for brevity, they were:
Increase public access to nationally significant
scientific literature.
Enhance the usefulness of digitized materials by
creating a Web repository of scanned literature, keywords, and
online resources with tools for searching and
analysis.
Create an educational tool for learning about plant
life. While the screensaver application is indexing keywords,
the participant's computer will display information about
plant life within the United States and around the world. The
information displayed will describe each plant name or term
currently being indexed on the participant's computer, and
will include descriptive data, images, maps, and the annotated
outlinks for that term.
Provide a model for adopting public-resource computing
applications within the library community.
Botanicus is doing a
wonderful job of meeting goals 1 and 2 including processing data
generated by SciLINC. The project has certainly also meet goal 4.
We have learned much about grid-based, distributed,
public-resource computing applications and the
BOINC architecture. There
are thoughts and plans for analyses down the road that will be much
more computationally intensive than the original SciLINC analysis and
we look forward in time to bringing these projects to you.
While the amount of data that SciLINC has to analyze will increase
greatly in the days ahead it does not appear that increasing the
volume of information is going to improve the user experience of
running the SciLINC client.
It has been suggested that we repackage our data into single files
instead of uploading and downloading 50 files per workunit as we
currently do. This suggestion has been heeded and implemented. We had
planned on doing it before SciLINC was rolled out but scheduling
prevented it and the community discovered the project before we were
ready to announce it. We expect that testing will show the repackaging
lessens the load placed upon the core BOINC client software. But, it
does not change the amount of data being transferred.
The truth is that the workunits fly by so rapidly that
implementing goal 3 never became realistic.
When development of SciLINC began, the project lead's
understanding was that from a technological and economic standpoint it
makes sense to use public-resource computing in place of an internal
grid computing architecture whenever less than a gigabyte of data is
required per cpu-day of computation. Using the BOINC framework to
transfer the data to clients, SciLINC meets this volume-of-computation
guideline.
However, our brief experience with the dedicated BOINC community
over the last couple weeks has shown that, to the community these
numbers may differ somewhat. In its original form SciLINC would have
needed to transfer roughly 250MiB of compressed data in order to
occupy a modern CPU for a day. This would expand to nearly 660MiB of
input data. Then the client would need to upload about 44MiB of
results which would compress to 17MiB. These numbers have only grown
as SciLINC has been improved and made more efficient.
This is not acceptable to the average BOINC user.
Looking at the numbers from the perspective of someone on dial-up,
if they set SciLINC to only 1% of their BOINC time, this would be
roughly 15 minutes out of a day. For this 15 minutes they would have
needed to download around 2.5MiB of data. This may not be a huge issue
for broadband users, but if someone is on dial-up (as we have learned
many BOINC fans still are) the transfer time would exceed the
computation time.
So, where are we now?
Even if the transfer:credit ratios were acceptable to the
community, we do not have enough data to realistically occupy hundred
or thousands of BOINC enthusiasts for a lengthy period of time. As we
have already seen on various community boards a relatively small
amount of credit is earned for a comparatively large load on their
system resources. Any computational and transport related improvements
that have been tested have only resulted in more data needing to be
transferred.
As stated above, we are investigating the possibility of
performing much more computationally intensive analyses in the months
ahead. It is expected that these will be a much better fit for a BOINC
project than the current task of text-indexing and taxonomic analysis
which has a relatively low mathematical complexity.
Because of this it has been decided that for now all SciLINC
computation will be performed internally. When we have something with
a better credit-reward ratio (and nicer screensaver) it will be made
available to the community.
Thank you again for your interest and support. We look forward to
working with you in the future.
The SciLINC Team
This has been
cross-posted to the forums
for discussion and feedback. |
|
| Brief Outage Resolved |
| We experienced a short time down this morning. MySQL was accidentally
shutdown for about 40 minutes. Everything should be back to normal
now. |
|
| User Profile Image Uploading Fixed |
| User profile images should now upload properly. Thank you
Zain Upton and
Paul@home for bringing this
to our attention.
The details are in
a message on our
Question and Answer forums. |
|
| Forums Online |
| The forums are now online. Please use the Question and Answers section for
reporting any bugs or problems. There is also a special message board
for general discussion.
We will be checking them in the morning. For now... sleep. |
|
| Project News November 20th, 2006 |
| The project will have a shutdown for maintenance on November 21th, 8 pm German time. The planned duration of the maintenance will be 1-2 hours. |
|
