SillyDog701

[richard mitnick]

I am interested in peoples' reactions to and participation in distributed computing, often called "crunching", where one installs a small piece of software which processes bits of research on various scientific projects.

Mozillazine has a team at folding @home, Stanford University.
There is a Spread Firefox team at BOINC.
Various university and other institutions have had teams at World Community Grid.

These projects run in the idle time that a computer is running but not in actual use.

I would love to know how people feel about this and if they participate.

>>RSM

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[Don_HH2K]

Personally I like the idea of distributed computing in general, but I don't think that it's reached its peak potential yet. Currently distributed computing is limited to large-scale applications like SETI@home. Now with digital media, an increasing number of home users are encoding video themselves with TV tuners or capture cards, and with modern power-hungry video coding standards such as WMV9/VC-1 and H.264, every bit of processing power helps. There are devices like the Turbo.264 that Antony uses to speed up his encoding, but in my opinion there's also a potential market for a home Beowulf cluster for these sorts of tasks.

Consider that Vista and Mac OS X Leopard are releasing with not-so-spectacular backwards-compatibility. Some users may go out and buy new machines to run either OS. From there, the older machines could be kept around such that they'd function mainly as a second processor for high-demand tasks. In the case of, say, a decent G4 or Pentium 4 box, doing so could decrease the time it takes to encode your average half-hour TV show. For instance, I do my encoding on a dual 2GHz machine. At the same time I also have a 2.4GHz Celeron, three P3s, a P2, and two P1s. If I had the resources to power on all of these CPUs all at once and keep them running, I could easily shave off a significant amount of encoding time by distributing the workload across them.

As for experience, I don't currently participate in any such programs. A while back I ran one on a 233MHz box, which at the time was my main PC, and it ended up using more than idle threads, to the point where it'd interfere with even simple programs like Netscape and Word.

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[richard mitnick]

Don-

Thanks, you went way over my head, and, far away from my question.

I am interested in the participation in scientific research projects. SETI is maybe the granddaddy of projects at BOINC, but there are many others.

I have two Core 2 Duo Vista machines and two PIII XP machines. I am running seven projects at BOINC on three of the machines, and six BOINC and three WCG projects on one of the Vista machines.

I got my friend running projects. He resurrected two older machines and they run BOINC 24/7/365, along with his new Core 2 Duo XP machine which runs BOINC when he is present.

Any other enthusiasts out there?

>>RSM

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[Antony]

As Don pointed out, many people grid their computers to do encoding tasks (CPU-hungry). In Mac OS X, "Xgrid" is built-in and in Apple's Final Cut Pro, the support of grid (Qmaster) is also included.

As for me personally, I don't mind donating my Mac's CPU for researches. I don't turn off the computers at night. My PowerBook goes to sleep, but my iMac stays on almost 24/7.

I think I shall really spend time to read OpenMacGrid in MacReaserch. (Been lazy)

BTW, [sdt=13082]another similar thread[/sdt].

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[Mandrake]

I am interested in peoples' reactions to and participation in distributed computing, often called "crunching", where one installs a small piece of software which processes bits of research on various scientific projects.

Mozillazine has a team at folding @home, Stanford University.
There is a Spread Firefox team at BOINC.
Various university and other institutions have had teams at World Community Grid.

These projects run in the idle time that a computer is running but not in actual use.

I would love to know how people feel about this and if they participate.

>>RSM

Absolutely. I run Folding @ Home on both of my dual core systems (E6300 @ 3Ghz, E2140 @ stock).

I don't bother with the older computers, they're just way too slow to make much of a difference. For instance, on a Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.4Ghz it takes about a day to complete one 'work unit' in Folding @ Home. The Pentium 3 600mhz I have here would take at least 8 days to get the same task done!

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[richard mitnick]

Terrific article on "crunching"

>>RSM

http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... geNumber=1

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[transporter45]

Don-

Thanks, you went way over my head, and, far away from my question.

I am interested in the participation in scientific research projects. SETI is maybe the granddaddy of projects at BOINC, but there are many others.

I have two Core 2 Duo Vista machines and two PIII XP machines. I am running seven projects at BOINC on three of the machines, and six BOINC and three WCG projects on one of the Vista machines.

I got my friend running projects. He resurrected two older machines and they run BOINC 24/7/365, along with his new Core 2 Duo XP machine which runs BOINC when he is present.

Any other enthusiasts out there?

>>RSM

I do Folding@Home too. My friend and I fold under the same name. Its fun to do and very addicting!

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[richard mitnick]

Mandrake-

Don't discount that PIII. I am running tasks on 2 PIII's along with my 2 dual core machines. I was encouraged by BOINC people to not be discouraged. I had a bad experience on a PIII with one project.

If you look for projects with tasks that your machine can finish, shorter tasks, what you do is allow BOINC or WCG to distribute more intensive tasks to other faster machines. BOINC and WCG can balance this out.

On one project,the same task takes four times as long on my PIII as on my dual core. But it gets done it time.

And if you overextend a PIII, BOINC will let you know and you can try something else.

Best,
>>RSM

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[Antony]

Just to put my hands up here.

for the last few days, I've been running Folding@home on my PlayStation 3. I run it when I am not using my PS3 for games, DVDs or Blu-rays.

I simply leave the PS3 running overnight.



Shall we start a SD701 team on Folding@home?

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[richard mitnick]

Hey Antony-

First, any project that you wish can use help. However, folding@home is huge already, with what I understand is over 150,000 crunchers on its one project, and one of the really biggest teams is a Mozillazine team.

World Community Grid, which has a variety of projects in Cancer, Aids, Dengue Fever, and the newest, Nutritious Rice for the World, has only about 80,000 active crunchers spread over the whole group of projects. WCG is sponsored by IBM and powered by IBM.

I would urge you to take a look at the WCG web site and look at its security, etc.

There is, of course, BOINC with a huge number of projects spread over many scientific fields. I personally think that BOINC offers the widest spectrum for people who want to immerse themselves in some fabulous science via the projects' web sites, forums, etc. In my view, I get the most satisfaction out of participating in everything from the Rosetta project, which develops software for protein folding work; Spinhenge, working on chemotherapy; LHC@home, working on the Large Hadron Collider at C.E.R.N., and just so many others. BOINC's projects are worth a look. Each has its own web site.

All crunching is good crunching.

>>RSM

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[Mandrake]

I already run Folding@Home for another team (XCPUs). There's a new GPU Folding@Home client that lets you complete work units on any video card that supports CUDA (Geforce 8+ and the comparable Quadro cards). The really crazy thing is that my Geforce 9800 GTX gives me four times more ppd (points per day) than running F@H on my CPU!

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[Antony]

The main reason I decided to join Folding@home is simply it is built-into PlayStation 3.

In PlayStation 3, the option is simply there. All you need to do is to select it (under the XMB ( cross menu bar)), update the software, and let it run.

It's like MSIE was built into Windows operating system, and people started using it.

The really crazy thing is that my Geforce 9800 GTX gives me four times more ppd (points per day) than running F@H on my CPU!

Wow! I wish I had a powerful graphic card.

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