ivory tower ftl

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dumas777

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Message 64773 - Posted: 4 Jan 2010, 7:34:41 UTC

Was going to go on a long rant but basically imho Baker lab sends a bad message by letting their rosetta@home infrastructure fall apart during the holidays. By saying hey this isn't mission critical and we cant be bothered to even check we are out of workunits and servers are down what does this say to volunteers that are spending real money (as opposed to gov grant money) to help? I am sure this will get fixed tomorrow as the following number hopefully gets someones attention.

TeraFLOPS estimate: 7.948
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mikey
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Message 64776 - Posted: 4 Jan 2010, 10:16:35 UTC - in response to Message 64773.  

Was going to go on a long rant but basically imho Baker lab sends a bad message by letting their rosetta@home infrastructure fall apart during the holidays. By saying hey this isn't mission critical and we cant be bothered to even check we are out of workunits and servers are down what does this say to volunteers that are spending real money (as opposed to gov grant money) to help? I am sure this will get fixed tomorrow as the following number hopefully gets someones attention.

TeraFLOPS estimate: 7.948


Actually according to their own boards people are getting units as we speak! Seems someone gave up time with their own family to come in and fix the problem. Su?ks to be them, or their family!! I know I would not have come in to fix a project that is not mission critical!! I wonder how many people actually had no work for their pc's? Or if they found another project to crunch for for a few days as is/was suggested almost everywhere. I would agree with you if Baker Labs, or any Boinc Project, were on the verge of developing anything critical to the very existence of life on this, or any other, Planet. But they are not. Baker Labs is developing 'processes', not cures. WCG is actually working on cures, but is not close to anything. Malaria is also working on a cure but is not close to curing Malaria. Has each and every Boinc Project developed a better understanding of something? ABSOLUTELY!!! Are people in general better off because of Boinc, again ABSOLUTELY!! But no Boinc Project is mission critical and anyone that thinks they are needs to take a deep breath and understand we all have a long way to go down this road we travel!! IMHO of course.
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Profile rochester new york
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Message 64778 - Posted: 4 Jan 2010, 12:20:31 UTC - in response to Message 64776.  

Was going to go on a long rant but basically imho Baker lab sends a bad message by letting their rosetta@home infrastructure fall apart during the holidays. By saying hey this isn't mission critical and we cant be bothered to even check we are out of work units and servers are down what does this say to volunteers that are spending real money (as opposed to gov grant money) to help? I am sure this will get fixed tomorrow as the following number hopefully gets someones attention.

TeraFLOPS estimate: 7.948


Actually according to their own boards people are getting units as we speak! Seems someone gave up time with their own family to come in and fix the problem. Su?ks to be them, or their family!! I know I would not have come in to fix a project that is not mission critical!! I wonder how many people actually had no work for their pc's? Or if they found another project to crunch for for a few days as is/was suggested almost everywhere. I would agree with you if Baker Labs, or any Boinc Project, were on the verge of developing anything critical to the very existence of life on this, or any other, Planet. But they are not. Baker Labs is developing 'processes', not cures. WCG is actually working on cures, but is not close to anything. Malaria is also working on a cure but is not close to curing Malaria. Has each and every Boinc Project developed a better understanding of something? ABSOLUTELY!!! Are people in general better off because of Boinc, again ABSOLUTELY!! But no Boinc Project is mission critical and anyone that thinks they are needs to take a deep breath and understand we all have a long way to go down this road we travel!! IMHO of course.




Ive been getting work units all through this
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Sid Celery

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Message 64780 - Posted: 4 Jan 2010, 15:32:53 UTC - in response to Message 64776.  
Last modified: 4 Jan 2010, 15:37:04 UTC

I wonder how many people actually had no work for their pc's? Or if they found another project to crunch for for a few days as is/was suggested almost everywhere. I would agree with you if Baker Labs, or any Boinc Project, were on the verge of developing anything critical to the very existence of life on this, or any other, Planet. But they are not. Baker Labs is developing 'processes', not cures. WCG is actually working on cures, but is not close to anything. Malaria is also working on a cure but is not close to curing Malaria. Has each and every Boinc Project developed a better understanding of something? ABSOLUTELY!!! Are people in general better off because of Boinc, again ABSOLUTELY!! But no Boinc Project is mission critical and anyone that thinks they are needs to take a deep breath and understand we all have a long way to go down this road we travel!! IMHO of course.

Well said Mikey. It very much seems to me that some of the comments seen over the last few days come from people who have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the various projects are doing and even what they're doing for the projects. Myself, too, to some degree and I've had to reconsider my crunching 'strategy' through this period, guided by some of the comments (even the heated ones).

It's an interesting question - how many people are currently active (rather than just registered) on Rosetta who don'twon't run any other project, who run a small enough buffer and haven't extended their runtimes as soon as a problem was apparent and are currently out of Rosetta WUs. Even active users will be shut down over the holiday too, of course, so I imagine it's fewer than even I might've originally guessed.

I was one, but added WCG at a low resource share and as far as I'm aware the Boinc manager keeps tabs of 'debt' on a project so that a shortage of WUs on one is caught up when they become available again. As such, there's no ultimate loss.

The reason for this tracking of 'debt' appears to be because it's quite routine for a project to be out of WUs for a short time for a wide variety of reasons, and as such is no big deal. If a particular volunteer choses to put all their eggs in one project's basket, keeps a small enough buffer and doesn't flex their runtime, then a risk always exists they'll run out of work and there'll be nothing to crunch, but that's a user's choice (and responsibility to some extent).

Taking a peek at the OP's project list I see that he has 4 active projects so I suspect he wasn't out of work at all for his machines (one shows over 100 Rosetta WUs from 12/25 unused for some reason) and the debt will be clawed back by the Boinc manager once new Rosetta WUs come through.

Doesn't that seem right? If so, what's the actual issue? It seems, largely, to be moot.

Edit: I was going to make a guess at the number of Rosetta-only users, but Boincstats seems to be down atm so I can't. Happens to all the sites at one time or another, I guess ;)
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dumas777

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Message 64802 - Posted: 5 Jan 2010, 0:34:06 UTC - in response to Message 64780.  

Actually am indifferent to the whole affair and was in a troll mood at the time. As you noted rosetta@home is one of the few single type projects I contribute to just because I don't trust any one single researcher to actually use my computer effectively so I prefer multi projects such as WCG (which seems to have very little downtime, funny that being ran by IBM) and of course when rosetta wu went titsup I had Ibercivis set to a low resource share to take over. My complaint was not Rosetta was down, almost all projects go down from time to time but the fact as noted elsewhere R@H almost always goes down during extended holidays due mostly to neglect. Granted R@H is not like the real world where 24/7 support is necessary by contract but it does make the project look like some grad students pet hobby instead of the super computer it really is. I assume Baker lab is doing great science and not just wasting electricity but if so like I said good to not trust any one researcher.
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Sid Celery

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Message 64825 - Posted: 5 Jan 2010, 22:36:54 UTC - in response to Message 64802.  

Actually am indifferent to the whole affair and was in a troll mood at the time...

But not so indifferent that you had to create a new thread rather than tag n to the others? I found it most ironic to complain about wasting Gov't grant money, then expecting them to pay people to come in during holidays or weekends.

No biggie either way.
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