LHC@home

Hello, fellow crunchers. I've just joined this project.

Intro first: I live in rural Arkansas (southern U.S.) and I have crunched for many years -- first looking for prime numbers (can't remember project name), then for FightAIDS@Home, and then for the World Community Grid for the past year. I formed the HomeBrewers team on the WCG and our team has managed to make it to #103 as of today, and now I have formed the same team here. I am very happy crunching for the WCG, but since I have just switched over to using BOINC and now have the ability to work on more than one project, I am now expanding. The main reason for my expansion is to try to reach more people and generate more interest in a project that I have which is lobbying our legislators for a new law to require our schools to teach our children about grid computing in any basic computer classes. I think that this is the best way to improve recruitment for all grid projects in general; by teaching our kids how safe, secure, interesting, and beneficial these projects are, we should be able to cure the ignorance, apathy, suspicion, and distrust which seems to be the biggest barrier to recruitment. I hope you will take a few minutes of your time to check out my website -- http://www.2plus2is4.com

While that site does link to my www.velek.com which admittedly promotes the WCG more than any other project, I am going to work on that to make it more neutral; meanwhile, I do have a paragraph about the LHC and links to this site. I therefore hope you will not interpret this as an effort on my part to try to steal crunchers from LHC for the WCG. I can only do so much so fast, and I am working very hard through my project to help mankind through all grid projects.

Please let me know what you think.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

---

Welcome Bill,

Your endeavor, while to some extent unconventional in it's approach, sounds very interesting and noble in it's aspiration. I'm sure we all can appreciate the goal of increasing participation and increasing awareness for DC efforts; i'm also sure we can suggest it's quite important for many respective reasons.

I am sure you will find the BOINC community, and LHC in particular, a great group of dedicated people, as it sounds like you are.

My best of luck to you and my most sincere welcome to LHC,
Mike

Postscript: sorry for the broad generalizations, and i guess my interpretation of 'common conventions' is an arguable position; there is no need to allow that to detract from my welcome message. :)

---

blog pictures

Yes, I welcome you and your enthusiasm.

Please make sure your team know that KHC is not going to make them top of the BOINC credits anytime soon - we rarely have work these days, and therefore the cobblestones you get here

a) will not compare to what you can get onother projects

b) will take along time to catch up with those who joined LHC when it still had regular work.

Things will change, but not till well into the new year - the exisitng stuff has to be moved from CH to UK and only after that will anyone look at getting more work on this project.

So big welcome, but excuse us if things are a bit quieter than your team is used to. Do check out the Projects to mix with LHC thread as you may well find you want to join some of those projects as well.

River~~

---

I hope you will take a few minutes of your time to check out my website -- http://www.2plus2is4.com

While that site does link to my www.velek.com which admittedly promotes the WCG more than any other project, I am going to work on that to make it more neutral;

Which site is more important to you?

If your answer is 2plus2is4, then my suggestion would be to drop the link to velek and point people at Dimitri's dc-howto instead. This is by far the best pointer to the diversity and benenefits of dc that I have seen, and you'd need to work for a long time to get half as good as him -- and in any case by then Dimitri would have moved his site along even more (he does still add stuff from time to time).

And not having to do the work on listing all the projects would give you more time to promote the genuinely novel (and in my opinion important) idea of bringing dc into education before people get to uni.

ie: focus on the part of the job that still needs to be done, and take full advantage of the work that others (Dimitri in this case ) have already provided.

River~~

---

...I hope you will take a few minutes of your time to check out my website -- http://www.2plus2is4.com

hi again Bill,

A couple more comments, having looked back at the 2plus2is4 site again.

There is one detail you might consider putting a different slant on.

The computing power is (as you say) free to the projects. The computer hardware and software is already bought for other purposes by the donor/participant, so is free in that sense. There is, however, a financial cost to the donor in the form of the power bill. Even if boxes are left on 24/7, they use less power when idle than when the cpu is crunching, and this is especially true of the kind of intensive crunching done by most dc projects.

I am suggesting that you don't ignore this angle, make it a selling point of what you are trying to do.

Growing up as I did in the UK I was taught by my family and at school that giving blood is part of the way we look after our fellow citizens, and part of the way we Brits like to look after each other. It makes a difference not only to the cost of healthcare, but also adds to what it means to be part of our society.

The cost of giving cpu time to a project is small - less than the cost of powering security lights and cctv on your poroperty, which many city dwellers take as routine. But it is a real cost and we can celebrate people's willingness to take it on. We donate a few pennies worth of power, leveraged up by the value of our computer hardware, and when many of us do this the porject benefits enormously. The fact that people do this internationally makes it part of global citizenship and, in my opinion, adds something positive to how we think of our fellow humans.

The second point, is if you are directing your energy mainly to US educators, don't leave out the pride that the US can properly take in its role in promoting dc to date.

SETI@home was not the first dc project, but it was the first to get known outside the IT specialist community, and it was the first with significant international public support. And it was an American project, and the development costs ulitmately sponsored by the US taxpayers through the grants that allowed the project to run. Having created the interest, the same team, an American team note, created the portable infrastructure that makes it easier for any project to get going - and made it freely available to other projects all over the world. BOINC was a donation by the American taxpayer to the global community. Looked at on the national level, this is very much the same kind of donor community spirit that individuals show when they leave their computer crunching for a project.

So, as an American talking to American education boards, you might want to take the line that your country is donating internationally, and each indivdual can do the same at home, if they own a pc.

And finally, don't leave out the schools. Look at the profile one of LHC's biggest donors - and OK I can't read German either but it is obvious what kind of establishment it is. Don't just get the schools to tell the kids about dc, don't just get the schools to encourage the kids to get their families involved, ask the schools to lead the way by joining up their computers to some project, get school pride going in their donation, and *then* sell the idea that the kids can do the same at home.

Good luck with your efforts.
River~~

Final point Bill,
about your team stats.

HomeBreweras are #41 in WCG BOINC teams at the time I am posting this, and already in the top 1000 teams across the whole of BOINC.

This ranking only takes account of credits gained through the BOINC interface of WCG - the fact that your teams is higher in the BoincStats ranking than in the WCG ranking shows that a bigger proportion of your teams work is done through the BOINC interface than for the other teams.

As your people join up to new BOINC projects, remind them they need to join the homebrewers team on every project, and please make sure you keep the spelling of the theam name exactly the same. Keep to these guidelines and your team will get the credits your memeber want it to get.

Here are some personal and team banners you might like. These are generated by the BoincStats site - banners are also available from other good sites but I will leave you to figure them all out. I personally prefer the clean, austere, look of the BoincStats banners, but that is a matter of taste of course.





The BoincStats detailed report on HomeBrewers Team contains up to date info, usually between 12 and 48 hrs out of date. If you click on the little graph icon in the table of projects supported, you will see detailed team stats for that project.

Detail for LHC will only appear after you have done work here, which may take a while as I explained before.

To see the bbcode I used to include banners and clcickable links in this post, just reply!

If you like WCG you will love Rosetta - do try it, link in the thread I pointed you to earlier.

River~~

---

:D Welcome Bill;

Very nice, it's good to see effort to stop those wasted cpu cycles and of course good to see any effort to educate .


My notes;

• I'd point towards BOINC rather than the wcg client
  
• I'd mention the huge educational value of the project decriptions for interesting {Me} anyways in biology chemestry physics all which are totaly new 'cince i was in school
  
• The large # and variety of BOINC projects ( I do 38 atm ) means there are many interesting fields of science represented in 1 kit
  
• Computers and the science behind d.c. are also a great educational opportunity
  
• Up here in the 'great white north' we waste cpu cycles too, I would love to see 'our' educators enlightened also
  
• Also of huge value the interaction with people and ideas from other languages we are exposed to i.e.
  

Anyways Thanks for Your efforts and I wish You the best of luck.

Hope You got some w.u. here today too. :D

---

Hello to you, Bill --

Your site is nicely put together, and I'm glad to have a link that I can put up for others who may need a little more explaination before they commit to donating time to Distributed Computing. Welcome aboard .....

---

If I've lived this long, I've gotta be that old