A few Questions From A New Participant

Message boards : Number crunching : A few Questions From A New Participant

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Profile Roland Windsor Vincent

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Message 8971 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 22:08:26 UTC

I'm new to RAH, having been a long time (7 years) Seti Classic partiicpant. When the Classic site shut down, I was forced to join BOINC. This appeared a more worthwhile project, so here I am.

My questions: What is the point of these credits? What good are they? Under Seti Classic, we just kept track of the number of work units we ran. This seems a little like handing out little gold stars to kindergartners.

Also: Does the Rosetta project have commercial ties? I'd like to think that my contribution is going to the public domain.

Roland Vincent

Gravity is just a scientific theory. We should also teach the religious view that God is pushing us down.
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Profile Snake Doctor
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Message 8974 - Posted: 13 Jan 2006, 23:18:42 UTC - in response to Message 8971.  
Last modified: 13 Jan 2006, 23:25:04 UTC

I'm new to RAH, having been a long time (7 years) Seti Classic partiicpant. When the Classic site shut down, I was forced to join BOINC. This appeared a more worthwhile project, so here I am.

My questions: What is the point of these credits? What good are they? Under Seti Classic, we just kept track of the number of work units we ran. This seems a little like handing out little gold stars to kindergartners.

Also: Does the Rosetta project have commercial ties? I'd like to think that my contribution is going to the public domain.

Roland Vincent


The credit system was developed to replace the old SETI WU counting system with a system that is supposed to more accurately reflect the actual contribution of a particular computer. THe credits are based on a lot of things but basically they are supposed to kind of level the playing field some and reflect the actual amount of work performed. Credits serve the same purpose as WU scores, it is just a different way of keeping score.

Rosette is NOT a commercial project. Since you are new here you may not have had time to look over all the the background material, but as you suspected this is real science with actual tangible benefits on the horizon.

Since you are also new to BOINC you might want to take a look at some of the "Stats" sites that are available such as http://www.boincsynergy.com/ or http://www.boincstats.com/

BOINC Synergy is also a team site but you can get the custom signature (see mine below) and the stats for the project you are working on without actually joining the team.

Welcome aboard
Phil


We Must look for intelligent life on other planets as,
it is becoming increasingly apparent we will not find any on our own.
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Profile kb7rzf
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Message 8977 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 0:15:13 UTC

Hi Roland, welcome to Rosetta!

I was looking at your results page, and noticed you have quite a few Client Errors. I don't know if you shut your computer off periodically (like overnight) or not, but one common problem was that you need to go into your account page, go to general preferences, and make sure to edit it to change "Leave applications in memory while preempted" to yes. This will affect other projects if you are attached to others as well. There was also discussion about having a minimum of 512mb of RAM for this project too, however others have said they did it with less.

Just some suggestions to help you along. Once again, welcome to Rosetta!

Jeremy

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Profile dcdc

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Message 8996 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 9:42:09 UTC - in response to Message 8971.  
Last modified: 14 Jan 2006, 9:43:53 UTC

Welcome to the project Roland

My questions: What is the point of these credits? What good are they? Under Seti Classic, we just kept track of the number of work units we ran. This seems a little like handing out little gold stars to kindergartners.


AFAIK Seti's work units (WUs) are all the same size - i.e. all require the same amount of processing to complete. There are a lot of projects out there, including this one, where there is variation in the amount of processing required to complete a WU, so tracking the number completed isn't a valid method of monitoring contributions.

HTH
Danny

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Profile Paul D. Buck

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Message 9001 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 11:18:54 UTC

Roland,

If you rummage the Wiki there is a FAQ in there that explains the reasons we went from WU counting to Cobblestones.

The system for calculating Credit is not as good as we would like, but, there are changes in the pipeline that we hope will correct the biggest problems. The bad news is that it will also take some effort by the projects ... but the check is in the mail ...

Oh, and the Wiki is your friend ...

Just about everything that is good to know is in there somewhere ... :)

And the editors keep adding to it ... and fixing the problems ...
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FluffyChicken
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Message 9014 - Posted: 14 Jan 2006, 15:23:56 UTC - in response to Message 8996.  
Last modified: 14 Jan 2006, 15:25:53 UTC

...
AFAIK Seti's work units (WUs) are all the same size - i.e. all require the same amount of processing to complete. ...


Actually not quite true, there all around the same size.
Angle effected the length of time it would take and you could also get some really short jobs.
Which is why the cobblestone/credit system was introduced.

Although It would be nice to also have a 'work unit' count as well, I know for rosetta each work unit is made up of a few tasks, so maybe 'task count' would be nicer.
Team mauisun.org
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Message boards : Number crunching : A few Questions From A New Participant



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