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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: BOINC credits vs WGC |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 109
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Better thread to discuss this would be this one: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,28162
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WCG
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
One need only look at the Boinc project Collatz Conjecture. How reasonable is it that a project can have less than 1% of the number of Active Host computers than WCG yet generate 2.3X the number of credits as WCG. Even allowing for the possibility of that project having faster computers, it appears unbelievable that the project is reporting 557 Tflops using 5,500 computers while WCG is reporting 343 Tflops on 233,000 computers? This shows a basic misunderstanding of the issue. The Collatz problem is superbly optimized for the ATI GPU. The clients have been created by people who know how to optimize code. The CPU client complies to the BOINC standards and uses the same WUs as the GPU client. It happens that the calculation for Collatz is able to be parallelized very effectively. Some ATI cards can currently use up to 3200 cores in parallel (HD 5970). Instead of running around claiming the world is flat, maybe the effort should be spent on taking some programming classes and getting clients prepared for GPUs. Making new rules and changing credit systems isn't going to stop technological advance. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I crunch here and at Collatz, (and a bit at gpugrid). I sense some disdain at the fact that people devote their computational resources to non-disease related sections. Honestly, it is an elitist thing to assume that WCG contributes to humanity and also in a somewhat underhanded manner imply Collatz is a waste of resources. Collatz is a very elegant app, and it is very efficient. It might not be applicable to some disease but it is exact. These are not models and simulations, this is pure number theoretic operation. The project returns very little data per result (a hundred bytes or so), but the data is exceptionally easy to read and assimilate. One might argue that understanding this mathematical conjecture is less important than proteins and such, but honestly, given the massive amount of computer power brought to bear on these projects, I think we have enough to spare. Also, as has been stated the reason Collatz has so much processing power is their GPU app. I have 3 teraflops of power between 3 relatively inexpensive cards. If WCG had GPU apps, they would certainly gain a ton of processing power. This is largely the reason Folding is as successful a project as it is. They have amazing apps for CPU, ATI, NIVIDIA, and PS3. They reach everyone who wants to crunch. I'd like to highlight this post because it addresses a problem that crops up repeatedly in the DC community. There is a tendency for the patrons of some projects to claim that their projects are superior (morally and otherwise) because they have certain short term goals that the average person can understand. Yes, it's more difficult to see the possible advances that something like mathematics research can bring about, because the effects are not so predictable. Advances in mathematics, physics and other base level sciences bring about the understanding that make projects like WCG even possible. They're all valuable in different ways. Insulting other peoples projects is anti-productive. Luddism is anti-productive. |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
All clients of BOINC 6.4 and up are fully NVidia GPU handling capable and from 6.10 also ATI. That what you refer to as client is the science/math application that sits in a BOINC wrapper so the client and the science application can communicate... they sit in shared memory.
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WCG
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Dataman
Ace Cruncher Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 4865 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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We will be participating in this effort: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/CreditNew In addition to improving the accuracy of 'claimed credits', this new system should improve the consistency of credit between BOINC projects. Extensive testing of this new system is being performed. That link is pretty detailed. The quick summary of the system is that it will track the average difficulty for each result returned at the host-application version level and the over all application level. This will give a ratio which represents the efficiency of a specific host at processing work using a specific application version. Once that efficiency is measured, the system should be able to determine appropriate claimed credits more accurately. Additionally, it will make it more obvious to users which applications their systems are more efficient at relative to the overall set of systems. In reverse, this will also be used to provide more accurate estimates of time to completion when workunits are sent to clients. Since everyone can type but few take the time to read ... a BUMP for Kevin's post.  The pace may be slow  but at least there is attention to the problem at BOINC.    |
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Hypernova
Master Cruncher Audaces Fortuna Juvat ! Vaud - Switzerland Joined: Dec 16, 2008 Post Count: 1908 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I'd like to highlight this post because it addresses a problem that crops up repeatedly in the DC community. There is a tendency for the patrons of some projects to claim that their projects are superior (morally and otherwise) because they have certain short term goals that the average person can understand. Yes, it's more difficult to see the possible advances that something like mathematics research can bring about, because the effects are not so predictable. Advances in mathematics, physics and other base level sciences bring about the understanding that make projects like WCG even possible. They're all valuable in different ways. Insulting other peoples projects is anti-productive. Luddism is anti-productive. I completely agree with you on that CanoeBeyond. As I mentioned in another post where two WCG projects were put head to head in terms of usefulness for number crunching, the advances in science very often come from unexpected direction, and sometimes from even other fields. All fields of science profit from each other and in general in an unexpected way. That is the beauty of fundamental research. A world of surprise where the future outcome is not predictable.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Right. Putting down math projects because science projects are more meaningful? How can you do science without mathematics? The only solution to the problem is having GPU project for WCG. I think most people complain because they have invested a lot on CPU farms for years and get overtaken in a week (BOINC credit wise) by someone with just a couple of systems with multiple GPUs.
Seriously, all my CPUs only crunch WCG while my GPUs crunch MW, Collatz, and DNETC when MW and Collatz are down. Why should there be a pissfight on what project is better when we can do both CPU and GPU. If you get jealous of the GPU crunchers, then buy GPUs and overtake them. |
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nasher
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Dec 2, 2005 Post Count: 1423 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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@ Haris Dublas - not saying that math projects are useless but some of them may be less usefull than others.. and some in my opinion are relitivly useless for most projects
----------------------------------------some of the boinc math projects selectd from WWW.Distributedcomputing.info i just grabed a few of them and didnt reserch them much... here are some examples of what i personaly consider less meaningfull projects than science projects --- Help SZTAKI Desktop Grid find all generalized binary number systems up to dimension 11. The project website is written in Hungarian, but some of the text is also available in English. A detailed project description is available in English. The project completed its 10 dimensional project and began its 11 dimension project on August 2, 2005. The project will provide detailed information about the 10 dimension project results soon. --- PrimeGrid is a test project for PerlBOINC, a Perl-language-based port of the BOINC platform. The project's first sub-project was a cryptography project which attempted to factor the number in the RSA Factoring Challenge. Currently the project is running a sub-project, Primegen, to generate a public sequential prime number database, and is supporting a number of other mathematics distributed comptuing projects. --- Help ABC@home find abc triples for the ABC Conjecture, "one of the greatest open problems in mathematics." "abc triples are positive integers a,b,c such that a+b = c, a < b < c, a,b,c have no common divisors and c > rad(abc), the so-called radical of abc. The ABC conjecture says that there are only finitely many a,b,c such that log(c) / log(rad(abc)) > h for any real h > 1. ... If i[the conjecture] is proven to be true, a lot of other open problems can be answered directly from it." The project completed its first major goal in Janaury, 2009, and will restart in February, 2009, with a new, better algorithm and new work units. --- Help the WEP-M+2 Project find factors of Mersenneplustwo numbers. "Mersenneplustwo numbers are those integers that are two more than a Mersenne prime. Mersenne primes are of the form 2^p-1 (see Mersenne Prime Search). This makes Mersenneplustwo numbers of the form 2^p+1." --- ok that is a few of the MATH boinc projects that i do not see helping scientists work to help anything like WCG. I am sure there are some usefull math projects that will help the science along but none of these seem to me at least. yes i am intrested where i stand on BOINC credits but i am not buying new machines or new GPU's to increase my power.  |
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Hypernova
Master Cruncher Audaces Fortuna Juvat ! Vaud - Switzerland Joined: Dec 16, 2008 Post Count: 1908 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Seriously, all my CPUs only crunch WCG while my GPUs crunch MW, Collatz, and DNETC when MW and Collatz are down. Why should there be a pissfight on what project is better when we can do both CPU and GPU. If you get jealous of the GPU crunchers, then buy GPUs and overtake them. Your comment is wise. I personally have difficulties imagining that somebody has invested in a small crunching farm to produce points whose intrinsic value are zero. Investing thousands of dollars just to be on top of a boinc point list. People are free for sure to spend their money as they wish no problem with that. At least it will benefit the IT industry, and as they have anyway to crunch for something everything is not lost. Points are a byproduct, a secondary effect, a collateral. The project, it's objectives, the science, it's priorities, the results, the progress, these are the primary movers. |
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sk..
Master Cruncher http://s17.rimg.info/ccb5d62bd3e856cc0d1df9b0ee2f7f6a.gif Joined: Mar 22, 2007 Post Count: 2324 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Investing thousands of dollars just to be on top of a boinc point list. Pointless list you mean!People are free for sure to spend their money as they wish no problem with that. Yes, and we are free to poke fun at them!Points are only indicative of your contribution to any given project - they do not suggest any relative project value, or if it has value at all. That is left for us to determine ourselves. On my chart, there would be many Zeros. I am fairly careful where I crunch, and try to do projects that are of some use. I don’t try to find aliens, look for anomalies in deep space, count pi to the millionth decimal or other pointless maths. However lots of people (most perhaps) seem quite happy to use their resources (and the world’s natural resources) on such meaningless projects. Perhaps our project choices are a fair reflection on who we are? |
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