LHC@home

I wasn't suggesting that he host the pages, but rather that he provide a "universal BOINC portal" that read the project pages as they are (with the non-standard code (such as "<p>") and output them in his beloved XHTML.

What on earth would be the point of this? ...
<gratuitous rant snipped>...

I notice that this is slowed down by a minority of users who set their caches to maximum. When the number of work units available hits zero, we still have to wait a week or more while the people who grab a maximum number of units empty their cache before the scientists can even begin the analyzing process.

That doesn't help the project - that's greed by people who want the most LHC units.

Thanks to your clear explanation, I raised my cach for .01 to 10 days.
And yup,
As soon as there was work to do, I was able to get a bunch of it to work on.

I'm sure MattDavis or someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the original post, quoted in part here, was saying that you *shouldn't* max out your cache. Doing that means you get a lot of work, true. But it also means that the work gets done slower because you're sitting on work that other people with a lower cache (getting work as they complete it) could be doing. Leaving some computers dry is not the best way to get work done promptly. It slows down the process and makes everyone wait longer to get more work. Wasn't that the whole point behind the original post and subject of limiting work units? To make sure that everyone gets a fair share, not to have some people hogging work for themselves while others' computers get left dry?

Rytis couldn't host the pages for each project, and in any case, it wouldn't be appropriate.

I love LHC, and I realize it's different from the other BOINC projects in that it doesn't have continuous work to send out. It sends out work, and analyzes those results before sending out the next batch.

I notice that this is slowed down by a minority of users who set their caches to maximum. When the number of work units available hits zero, we still have to wait a week or more while the people who grab a maximum number of units empty their cache before the scientists can even begin the analyzing process.

That doesn't help the project - that's greed by people who want the most LHC units.

When the number of available units hits zero, the scientists shouldn't have to wait more than a day or two. I suggest that the project limit the number of work units per computer to 2-3 at any given time. That way, as soon as all the work is sent out LHC will get them all back very soon after. Once a work unit is sent back, that computer can have another.

This will speed up work-unit generation for all of us (my cache is set very low and every work unit I get is sent back within 12 hours, since I have other projects running too) since LHC scientists will get their work back faster and thus be able to create the next batch sooner.

Yes, BOINC can use numerous CPU's.
The PentiumD is not an optimal choice for Dual Core however, consider Core Duo or Athlon64 X2 instead.
Both outperform the Pentium D by a good margin, at far lower power consumtion and less heat.

Help me understand the process.

Does this David Anderson "own" BOINC or the web pages it uses?

Are these pages used in each project or only at BOINC central or where?

How does the fact that they are not XHTML impact your personal goals?


Could you build a "betterBOINC" to front-end the BOINC pages and deliver them in XHTML?

If you could, would they be "so much better" that the world would beat a path to your portal to BOINC?

It seems a more effective technique of pesuasion would be to build your own better frontend.
If it really is "better", people will want to use your pages...
You could even sell ad space...

Or, if "it's really only about the science and not the pages," then natural selection will cause your pages to die out...

Finally, regarding standards.
They are a "good thing(tm)."

But, if they are missing widely desired function (such as <p>) then perhaps they are poorly or prematurely standardized....

Please help me understand better.
thanks
Phil

In a way, David Anderson is the owner of BOINC, in that he's the project architect.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/contact.php

From the Boinc website : "BOINC is a software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources..."
So, Boinc's only job is to be a distributed computing platform.

Items like 'GUI's are just eye candy, you can remove the graphical part and have a perfectly good distributed computing project.
Theoretically, they could just leave boinc as a command line executable and fulfil the distributed computing requirements.

To streamline things, we would remove graphics and have text based web pages for forums and stats.
Once it's text based, they could just have users telnet in, instead of using HTTP protocol and it's overhead with headers and tags and whatnot.

The forums, which are a drain of server resources, could be replaced by newsgroups on usenet. such as NEWS://comp.distributed

</humor>

.... [snip] .....
for what it is worth, I have error detecting and correcting memory on my machine.

I wonder how typical that is anymore...

Common on all servers of all sizes.

What do you think the probabilty is of a single bit (or any other) error causing the same incorrect answer in even TWO of the three members of the quorum?

Extremely small, I'd guess.

Sixtrack suffers from the single-bit sensitivity because of the way it handles its numbers, and the fact that it does the operations repeatedly. A single bit error in the first iteration of an algorithm will generate a different erroneous result than the same error occuring at, say, iteration 500,000. Given that a single bit problem can creep in potentially anywhere (and anywhen), the chances of two different computers generating the same incorrect result are vanishingly small.

The same can't be said of the same computer running the same unit twice, however. It is possible that some sort of systematic failure could generate consistent errors at consistent points in the algorithm. Such a computer would probably never generate a valid LHC result, although it might work perfectly well in every other regard.

Does anyone think that the reason the initial replication is 5 while the quorum is only 3 is to generate extra work for all the work hungry volunteers?

The five/three ratio is to improve the chances of getting a quorum at the first attempt. It's down to SixTrack's extreme sensitivity to numerical accuracy. In aven the most solid computer there can be the occasional single bit error that will throw the result off. Sending five results should improve the chance of a reaching a quorum, and so reduce the completion time for the study.

From what I see on the results pages, most results reach quorum at three, so a replication of five is redundant. I'd like to know if the fourth and fifth results are still issued if a quorum has already been reached.