BOINC@Australia - Movers and shakers

[danhtruong]

Ahh, the dedicated crew of skynetters.

I thought I'd start a new threat to mark our progress in the Alliances ladder
I was keeping a spreadsheet at work and updating it for the past three days and figured I might as well share it in this forum:

Since we nabbed position 7 from Curtin IT Services earlier this week, it doesn't look likely they'll reclaim their spot.
L'Alliance Francophone are in position 31 with 37,656 credits.

United States Alliance is currently in position 6 and we're in position 7.
25/10/11: United States Alliance had 194,385, B@A had 158,169, difference = 36,216
26/10/11: United States Alliance had 198,387, B@A had 162,771, difference = 35,616 (gain of 600)
27/10/11: United States Alliance had 202,962, B@A had 167,048, difference = 35,914 (loss of 298)
(Statistics captured at 9:00am every morning the moment I step foot in the office)

I've only kept stats for three days, so for the moment, it's difficult to project if/when we'll hit position 6.

Tin Man and LawryB are back on board and kashi (true to his word and with the help of an upgrade to unlimited internetz like dingo) are flying.

[kashi]

Haha, it's HokeyWB flying not me. I'm going in dribs and drabs. I had 5 SkyNets running last night until I found them all loafing. So I killed 2 and put another 2 cores on hunting my last WCG bronze. I think about 4 SkyNets is my limit really, with 5 I had no free memory and occasional disk paging. They should release a downloadable multi threaded version with a configurable number of cores for everyone with lower amounts of memory. Save having all those little browser windows open all the time too.

In case you haven't seen it, SkyNet contributor steve_s  has a blog about Nereus vs BOINC. In it there is a link to a memo written by Newman and Tseng from Oxford about Cloud Computing and the Square Kilometre Array.

As steve_s points out, one of the major drawbacks of Nereus compared to BOINC, the inability to cache work, is not mentioned. Another thing not mentioned is the large data usage of SkyNet gobbling up peoples' internet quota. I've noticed it doesn't seem to be using as much now as it did previously, I think they changed something. It's been going quite hard a lot of the time for the last few days on 3, 4 and 5 instances and it's only downloaded 3GB.

It was interesting that Java was actually faster for some applications. However I would like to see some results on how it scales with number of cores. With some BOINC project applications it is more efficient to run with 6 or 7 cores rather than 8. This is due to cache/memory contention losses particularly with hyperthreading. I remember one PrimeGrid subproject where output was the same with hyperthreading turned off. In other words, with 4 cores each core was twice as fast as with 8 cores. As less power was used with hyperthreading turned off, hyperthreading was less efficient in this case.

[danhtruong]

Not sure which alliance rocketed up the ladders over the long Melbourne Cup weekend, but we've slipped one spot back to 8th with an alliance total of 199,182 credits.

We are slowly gaining ground on United States Alliance (who also slipped a position down to 7th), with the difference down from 36,745 to 33,160 credits.

We also have a new member to theSkyNet B@A alliance, so a warm welcome to northcross.

[kashi]

Yes, Curtin University installed theSkyNet on lots of their computers and flew up the rankings. BOINC@AUSTRALIA theSkyNet team member RAMen has charted the team rankings here.

I've noticed the SkyNet isn't granting as much credit as before. It is supposed to give 4 credits per hour per application plus 1 credit per 15MB of data. That would be 288 credits per day just for connection on my 3 browser applications. I haven't been getting that much even with data added. Not to worry, it would be affecting everyone the same, I was just expecting my total and the team's to be increasing more rapidly.;D

It doesn't seem to run all that often, probably more than half the time I look it is idle. Bit of a waste of resources but not too bad as on this hyperthreaded CPU my 4 BOINC cores speed up to blazes when theSkyNet is idle. I've got BOINC going half on WCG and half on SIMAP currently. It's running on VirtualBox Linux just in case DNA@Home ever releases any more work.

[danhtruong]

I wasn't aware of that link from RAMen - but that's an impressive chart.
how did you find out about that link?  i can't find RAMen posting anywhere in this forum.

I find that if i have multiple clients open, i have to check that they're actually running by clicking on the 'show your client' button.
sometimes, it may say i'm contributing in the main client window, but 'can't open internet explorer'.

[kashi]

RAMen is a member of the BOINC@AUSTRALIA theSkyNet team but as far as I know he is not a member of the BOINC@AUSTRALIA BOINC team, if that makes any sense. Same applies to Vince.  I feel they would qualify but I think currently full membership requires an active BOINC project, not really sure though. Not for me to say, that's a Dingo matter.:) Perhaps they may not wish to be part of the main BOINC team and post here anyway as they are members of other BOINC teams.

The link to RAMen's graph is in a few of his posts on theSkyNet forum.

Yes I always check if I'm connected properly. I'm down to 2 SkyNets today as computer kept crashing while I was trying out one of the team's lower ranking projects. It's not as low ranking now as it was yesterday.

[Dingo]

RAMen is a member of  Cruncher Junkies and I think there are a few in the SkyNet Alliance that are part of that BOINC Team.  This forum is just for our BOINC Team, as the current rules are that they must be crunching a BOINC project for the Team.   We had it open to the world at the beginning but got too many people joining that were not using BOINC at all and just joined the forum to create havoc.  Since we have tried to keep it a BOINC only forum things have been more cohesive and friendly and that is the way I like it.

[kashi]

Thanks for the explanation. I thought it was something like that. Sounds fair enough to me.

[Dingo]

The Alliance is gradually creaping up on the # 7 spot.  We are now only 28,996 away which is about 7000 less than last time I posted about this.

[kashi]

Yep creeping up on 7th, but zooming up on 6th. ICRAR will soon be eating our dust, muhuhaha.>:D


More graphs courtesy of RAMen, these will not be updated daily and I'm not certain how long they will be there:

Difference to US Alliance

Difference to ICRAR Alliance

[danhtruong]

Update:

Since Dingo posted on 05/11/11, we're moved from 28,996 to 18,457 credits away from #7 as at 08/11/11.

Would love to snatch #5, that way, BOINC@Australia will appear on the everyones dashboard (since by default, it only shows the top 5) under Alliances for more exposure  
(90,716 credits behind #5)

[Dingo]

The Team is now in 7^th place on the World Ladder.   Great work from the theSkyNet BOINC@AUSTRALIATeam.

[Dingo]

The Team should get into 6^th place in the world tonight or tomorrow.  We are also catching up to #5 #5 UK Skynet Group with 353720 credits.

Current Alliance:

BOINC@AUSTRALIA
Creation Date: 16th of September, 2011
Total Members: 16
Total Alliance Credits: 284249

    #1 kirdnem-vince 81571
    #2 Dingo 45758
    #3 RAMen 43898
    #4 northcross 23342
    #5 HokeyWB 15232
    #6 redwolf 14544
    #7 veebee 13873
    #8 LawryB 9898
    #9 kashi 9511
    #10 Dan 8130
    #11 Dennis Newton 7143
    #12 Tin Man 6358
    #13 neutrinoboy 3118
    #14 Grey Shadow 1333
    #15 ausdaniel 532

[danhtruong]

Fantastic work.
Just hit #6 as predicted by Ding o this morning.

ICRAR at #5 is 68,996 credits away and at 2,500 mean gain, all else being equal, #5 position should be about a month away and we'll be visiable on their homepage! 

http://203.0.178.90/~ramen/images/difference_ICRAR_alliance.png
Courtesy of RAMen

[kashi]

Great work team, 6th.         

Actually it's UK SkyNet Group next in our sights, currently 68,885 points up the road.

http://203.0.178.90/~ramen/images/difference_UK_Skynet_alliance.png