This one is as good, also linked on the WCG Facebook page... written from an actual contributors perspective, http://www.eptrail.com/estes-park-news/ci_275...rld-community-grid-effort

(Thought we had a "WCG in the News" thread somewhere, but will have half a decade of dust on it ;)

Thank you all for sharing those articles

ErikaT

I had been maintaining a thread on this but I've become so disenchanted with the project, I haven't bothered to update in probably a year or so. I do still have a google alert set to notify me of new articles but half the time I don't even read them.

I'd like to know where they get that 700k figure for members. Total membership according to BOINCstats is under 500k and active members is a mere 70k. Maybe they tossed in an extra zero.

I also think articles like this should be a little more forthcoming in terms of the extra electric used when running BOINC. We may be using spare cpu cycles but people running the project on a laptop will surely notice the extra heat.

And for those of us that run multiple machines where electricity costs are high, like moi for example, the extra usage can add up. I pay at least an extra $100 per month on my bill because of the 3 servers and 2 regular machines I run.

There are several good points here. I believe the difference between the numbers WCG reports and the number BOINCstats reports can be attributed to the previous software which was used prior to going the BOINC route. Those numbers would not be included in the BOINCstats totals. I do know the attrition rate of crunchers is high, probably in the 80% to 90% range, but I do recall a figure from Sekerob which showed WCG had a better record of retaining crunchers than most other projects. If I look on Boincstats for the day I started, there are a total of 82 people who started with WCG on the same day. Of that number 8 are still crunching, slightly less than 10%. It is too bad the figure is not higher, but that is maybe just the nature of the volunteer effort.
It is unfortunate that most laptops are not designed to run continuously at 100% of the cpu capacity. I am speculating there is an engineering tradeoff here between cost and usability. The designers do not anticipate the laptops will be used in the same way as a server designed to run 24/7 at 100%. When laptops are used in this way, I am pretty sure they are being used outside their design specifications.
You are absolutely correct about the cost of electricity. The old slogan about it being "penny cheap" is no longer true.

Sorry to hear heat killed your machines. The heat issue with GPU cards is a whole different issue than the CPU heat issue. I think Intel is dealing with the CPU issue by having their CPU's be more power efficient with each succeeding generation.(AMD is also undoubtedly aware of the issue, but lag Intel in performance.) Nvidia and AMD need to do the same with their GPU offerings. They seem to be more interested in performance than heat dissipation. Those high end GPU cards can also suck a lot of power.
Cheers