Project Update

[daveandton]

Sounds perfect. Put 12 cores on it. Wish I had more. Before I forget to mention it I wish everybody a safe and happy Christmas and New Year. Great to be part of the team. Dave

[dyeman]

Looks like the reason the French are doing so much work in POGS is that their main contribution is from a university (http://www.univ-lille1.fr/).  Probably have all of the PCs in their admin departments set up to crunch POGS.  Looks like their stats go down for Sunday and Monday so probably PCs turned off over the weekend.

Hopefully they will change projects soon....

[Dingo]

I have my main cruncher back and doing as many POGS tasks as I can as well.  New cooling system makes all the difference.  The pump went on the old one and it is an integrated system so not able to fix.  I will stay on POGS for a week or two 1005 then get my first badge on the new WCG project.

[daveandton]

Well done everybody. Staying in front with a Huge crunching effort. I'm lost for words. What a fantastic effort.
Dave

[JugNut]

It seems POGS is planning on using Virtual BOX for it's new apps?

At the moment I still prefer regular work.  VM's in boinc have been proven to work & have great potential but at the moment I still prefer the original way.  I'ts possible I just haven't used them enough to feel comfortable with yet?  There are other problems using V-Box as well but I doubt they'd effect many crunchers here.  How do you guy's find VM crunching in boinc? http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/forum_thread.php?id=506&postid=3662



@Dave: Well said mate, the team should be proud of it's efforts at POGS. 

[kashi]

VMs are handy when crunching on another OS is much faster than on your primary OS. They are a bit inefficient however and also can affect the amount of CPU resources available to GPU crunching in your main OS. I used Linux in VirtualBox for DNA@Home as that was much more efficient than Windows and when I crunch POGS I use Mac OS X which is faster than Windows once you can iron out its annoying CPU resource hogging foibles.

The advantage of running a BOINC application in a VM needs to be quite large to overcome the overhead of the VM. Also you need extra memory, enough to run the 2 OS at once.

Hopefully they'll get it right with POGS and test it thoroughly first even though their history on alternate ways of crunching is not good. They were repeatedly warned of the unsuitability and security implications of using Java for their Source Finder application but stubbornly persisted in continuing to use it. It was an annoying and unreliable application and finally fell in a heap but fortunately the BOINC applications were running by then. In their defence, they were new to distributed computing then and really thought Java was the ant's pants. This misplaced confidence in Java immediately raised the alarm with many with even a small amount of computer experience.

So basically I think VMs are OK for crunchers who choose to run them when they are more efficient but being forced by a project to use one is not my preference and may not be suitable for those with less powerful or lower memory computers.

Don't know how long before any of this will happen though, they've been talking about a GPU application for a long time now and still haven't released one.

[JugNut]

Hi kashi,
Thanks for your reply.  I noticed first hand the the speed up you get when using OSX in V-box to crunch POGS(thanks for the tip;) but I wonder about the overhead & complexity when crunching multiple projects at once.  It seems to works fine when you just use one project in the VM, but start adding a few different non-VM projects from at the same time and things can start getting sluggish when resources start to dry up.  Also as you mentioned GPU's can't use V-Box so they also must also be run outside the VM, which just adds to the juggling act needed to have all projects running as smoothly as possible. 
Mabe not a big problem for most but many of us here do run multiple projects on the one PC.   Sometimes I crunch up to 5 or more projects at once on the one PC & always have at least 3 or 4 running at once.

To me the big advantage of VM's is on the project side they only need to code once for just one OS saving them bucket loads of time that could be spent elsewhere and as mentioned in that post some of the astronomy computing tools are written only for *nix OS's.
 
Don't get me wrong I think VM's are the way of the future but theres still a lot to work out, at the moment i'm just trying to think ahead & imagine just how it will all work for me on a daily basis.  Then again it's not written in stone, as you mentioned POGS record is a little shaky when it comes to promised features, like GPU app's and then there was optimised app's has never appeared so it's safe to say anything "could" happen, we'll just have to wait & see.


PS.  Just out of interest has anyone crunched 2 or more V-Box supported projects at once?   Beauty@LHC, RNAworld, Atlas ect?

[daveandton]

I don't know if anybody has looked for a while but I just checked and we are about to lose our top spot very soon. Looks like every team has decided to knock us off that spot. If anybody would like to help keep us there it would be appreciated.
Dave

[Dingo]

Looks like POGS will be the project for the next AA so I am changing all my cores over to POGS.   I don't have that much any longer but I will have them 100% on POGS till the end of the AA if POGS wins then see how we are.

Yes there are a few Teams now that are going to overtake us as they are contributing a huge amount to the project.   We will have to see what happens when they do overtake us, if they ease off we may be able to get it back later.   It was good while it lasted but it was inevitable that someone sooner or later would knock us off.   Crunch on Team so we can keep them at bay as long as Possable.   https://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/top_teams.php?sort_by=total_credit

[jave808]

All cores on POGS now. 

[Dingo]

Just found that there is a POGS Challenge on at the moment to get to 50 Million so that is why so many Teams are hammering the project.  Hopefully when that is over ion just over 16 Days we will slowly be able to make it back to #1 if we loose it.

http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/forum_thread.php?id=533#3762

[daveandton]

AAAAHHHH. That makes a bit more sense then. Couldn't understand why the whole world decided to give us a run for our money
Dave           

[Dingo]

Our newest member of the Team has jumped to the top of the Team POGS stats.  http://boincstats.com/en/stats/137/user/list/0/0/6#11 I have sebd a couple opf other PM's to users on POGS that do not have a Team and show Australia as their country.

Well done Joe90 by being the #1 cruncher for POGS.      

[daveandton]

I am in complete and utter awe. Well done Joe90 and if I knew how to do it I'd give you some Kharma as well. Seeing I don't all I can say is . GREAT MATE. WELL DONE.
DAve

[JugNut]

Hey Dave, if you would like to give someone karma you would do something like this.

If we use Dingo post above yours for example you just click the little plus symbol in his(or anyone elses) post that looks like this [+ ].  Look just above dingo's avatar picture(2 lines above) is the words that says "offline"(or online)  It's right above that & looks like this [+ ] [- ].

Oh & i'll repeat what was told to me.  That was that clicking the [-] symbol should not be done lightly & is only to be used for very serious matters. You should contact the person first by PM & try to work things out if at all possible or contact dingo for advise.  To be honest I think the [-] symbol should be removed all together as it only invites accidental clicks & bad feelings(as has happened before). If it were removed there's always the "report to moderator link" if needed.  Just my 2 bobs worth.

Hope it helps.