Posts by Richard Mitnick

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Long run times? (Message 25142) Posted 23 Jan 2013 by Richard Mitnick Post: I just looked over at one of my machines and saw a task "Ready to start" with a duration of 46:53:23. The task begins "W0w1cbb_w1bb_23_s_64.31_59.32_q12.5_13_....". Does this look to be a valid task?
2) Message boards : News : First tests 2013 (Message 25081) Posted 11 Jan 2013 by Richard Mitnick Post: Yup, I got some too.
3) Message boards : News : First tests 2013 (Message 25077) Posted 11 Jan 2013 by Richard Mitnick Post: Does that mean that the WU's will not run on or go out to Windows?
4) Message boards : LHC@home Science : What is the future? (Message 25022) Posted 20 Dec 2012 by Richard Mitnick Post: I read on the CERN site that they wanted to increase the beam intensity and collision frequency, these seem to be linked closely to SixTrack. One would hope, for sure.
5) Message boards : News : Problems/Status 28th November, 2012 and PAUSE (Message 25017) Posted 19 Dec 2012 by Richard Mitnick Post: I was very hot on T4T, hot to get on it when it required an invitation, for which I begged and which I got. I was able to get up on the project with the Oracle VM and was quite successful for a long time. Then, things just all went to hell. I had originally I think five machines on the project. One by one they went awry. Project people tried to help out, but it was to no avail. At this point, I am no longer a participant. I still follow the project stats. I think at no point were there ever as many as 2000 users getting credit, which is a shame. I think the VM thing put a lot of people off. I think the project would be much more inviting if it were ported to Windows and Mac. You can see my results below. If you do attempt this project, I wish you well.
6) Message boards : LHC@home Science : What is the future? (Message 25016) Posted 19 Dec 2012 by Richard Mitnick Post: Any news of what "Sixtrack" will be doing now as the preparations for 2015 move forward? There was a fair amount of work for us in as recently as late Nov.- early Dec., but it seems now to have fallen off. There was a nice article in Symmetry Magazine in Sept and re-posted a couple days ago about the LHC's future. I did a post on it, http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/from-symmetry-scientists-already-planning-for-lhc-long-shutdown-2/. So, maybe you guys can tell us if we will be a part of the preparations, running simulations, etc. Thanks.
7) Message boards : LHC@home Science : What is the future? (Message 24313) Posted 12 Jul 2012 by Richard Mitnick Post: It might be nice for someone to come and tell us what the future looks like for LHC and for this project, how what happens at the LHC might relate to the ilc collider when it is up.
8) Message boards : LHC@home Science : HiLumi LHC (Message 23714) Posted 19 Nov 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Just read about this at CERN, HiLumi LHC, please give us some information about what we can expect and when. I am personally delighted to see this project taking on other work, I suggested in another thread that the admins look to keep us busy by getting other work.
9) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23571) Posted 20 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, that university's Physics Department has a CMS team. If anyone connected to the project knows anyone from that university, one of the very very best in the U.S., they should be approached about Sixtrack.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Long delays in jobs (Message 23540) Posted 17 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Tullio- That is very much the point. Keep work flowing. Some people are interested in what it is, some are not, but Einstein is keeping its users happy. That is exactly what I am looking for.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Long delays in jobs (Message 23538) Posted 16 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: I am going to stick my nose in here just one more time. The first most important responsibility of any organization or institution is to survive. This project has been given a second life. There are projects running on BOINC software which have more than one research target. one example is rosetta@home. Another is SETI@home. Both of these projects look at more than one kind of problem. Rosetta not only designs software used by other research projects (HPF in WCG); it also works in Malaria, anthrax, herpes. In protein folding it work in cancer, AIDS, Alsheimers. SET@home does not only Classic SETI, based in narrowband signals; it also does Astropulse, based in "broader-band short time pulses". The above mentioned WCG based HPF project, at the Bonneau Lab at New York University did not only Human Proteome Folding, but also the Human Microbiome Project. Also at WCG, the Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together project has worked on Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus, Yellow Fever. The point is Sixtrack can be a new beginning, but it need not be any kind of end point. LHC@home 2.0, suffering its own growing pains, is not covering all of the opportunities for work at CERN. I looked high and low at their site, I don't find for which experiments they are working. But, there are four, and they cannot be working for all of them. Also, at CERN, the LHC is not the end of the line. Next up will be the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), or, just maybe the International Linear Collider. These are more places to look for work to keep this project up and running. There is nothing sacrosanct about the name "SixTrack". It's almost brandy new. Maybe a better name would be LHC@home/subatomics or LHC@home/quanta. A lot of people thought when the Tevatron was done that Fermilab was done. Fermilab is alive and kicking, with a whole bunch of new projects. And that means real money, winched with a crowbar from a U.S. Congress filled with mediocrity. So, Fermilab did a really good job of staying in the game. And, last, we are going to save the James Webb Space Telescope, late and over budget and doomed, but oh so necessary. I personally will never detach from this project, unless I am kicked off. We need to attract and keep people and machines, that is my interest here.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Long delays in jobs (Message 23535) Posted 16 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: tullio- Einstein never seems to be in trouble for a dirth of work, so clusters are not a problem for Einstein. jujube- Thanks for your response. I fully understand the reasoning of the importance of farms, clusters, whatever they are called. For me, the signal question is why out of 92,000 total users, the project was down prior to this latest burst of energy to about 2500 users and I think 0.07 TeraFLOPS (that last number may be incorrect, someone might be able to correct it). But now we are at 4900 users, 2.155 Teraflops from almost 9000 machines. It has always been true that people could attach to multiple projects and thus always have filled cores. I am attached to about 12 different projects in varied groups based on the varying power of my machines and the needs of the projects. I am never out of work. But instead of just letting cores do other work, users left in droves. That is a problem with which the project must deal. Those current numbers work out to 1.84 machines/user average. I myself have now 6 machines attached. I do not think that I qualify as a farm or cluster. Nor does 1.84 imply any thing like that. Sure, there might be a small number of users with a large number of machines. And, the 92,000 is a total of different users over a period years, not all at any one time. But, it is not a lot of years. The question is why so many left and how we keep going in our current direction. I have nothing but the greatest respect for this project and its people, and great hopes for the project's continued success.
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Long delays in jobs (Message 23529) Posted 16 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: I recently added a sixth machine (ID 9937283) to work on SixTrack. I got one WU, it finished successfully. Then I got the messages of "Project has no work available". So, I came here looking for some sort of outlook on general job availability,and I found this thread. Everyone who knows me know that I am not technically adept, just zealous for the LHC. First, while I do know that there are people who build computers, maybe cheap Linux boxes whatever, and use BOINC projects to "race" them, I have never before seen the term crunching farms. That said, every BOINC project needs to deal with this phenomenon, and they do it. If there is something unique about SixTrack, then SixTrack needs to find a way of eliminating the crunching farms. The strength of any project is not measured by numbers of machines, it is measured by numbers of users. If I am one user with 100 machines, any time I like I can simply up and quit any project, and poof, 100 machines are gone. And, I know from my T4T experience that you guys can see who is doing what (jujube). LHC@home managed in its origins to squander almost all of 90,000 users (BOINCstats). I suggest that this was because "try it, you'll like it" failed for a lack of work. You need to keep crunchers busy. If that means that you somehow eliminate crunching farms, then that is what you need to do. We have a new opportunity to do something great. My personal wish is to see the two LHC@home projects each vie with SETI@home in TeraFLOPS. That is a tall order, and maybe we will never get there. But, we need to try to be the best that we can. If there is any error in my logic, I apologize and will certainly read any rebuttal.
14) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23510) Posted 14 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Today, I used Facebook to reach out to people at the WCG Clean Energy Project at Harvard; the Southern Methodist University Physics department; and Argonne Labs in Illinois. Have I no shame? Absolutely none. I asked that they visit the combined site, take a look at each project, attach however many people and computers as they can, and please spread the word to their colleagues. I have a good relationship with the CEP2 people at Harvard through Facebook. I have also adopted the expression HEPcats, a Jazz term from the Bop era,"HEP" in this case meaning High Energy Physics. This is called reaching out. Others have other relationships which they should exploit. I am keeping a list, so as not to go back to the same institution twice. (I am SURE that I am not the first person to use HEPcats in a Physics usage. I have never had an original thought in my life.)
15) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23505) Posted 14 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Did you see this blog post? http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/citizen-scientists-unite-around-two-lhchome-projects/
16) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23504) Posted 14 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: I sent you the email address via PM. Thanks.
17) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23496) Posted 13 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Here is an idea: W have over 4600 users with credit in the last 30 days (BOINCstats). That is enough to mount an old fashioned letter writing campaign. I looked around at the Physics web site of my university. I found that they had a team on CMS. So, I wrote a letter to the department asking for their help on personal computers, outlining both projects, a little bit on BOINC, etc. If 10% of our users wrote letters to their university Physics departments, that's 460 letters, maybe, yes, some duplication, but, hey, nothing ventured nothing gained. I got friendly on a Gecko browser forum with a high school sophomore in upstate New York. I did a little preaching and he started to crunch and then got up a crunching team in his high school. Then he moved. New school, new team. We need to reach out.
18) Message boards : Cafe LHC : What is being done to promote this project? (Message 23491) Posted 13 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: I am interested to know what is being done to promote this project, which has had over 90,000 users. I for one have been promoting it in my ScienceSprings blog, and in Comments to the US/LHC bloggers at Quantum Diaries. There are only 121 followers on Facebook. There is 1 follower on Twitter. There is an RSS feed, only four items. Social media is being used by CERN, all of the U.S. D.O.E. labs, BOINC, WCG, everyone. But, you know, no content does not get anywhere. An article at interactions.org did great things for LHC@home 2.0. It got out to the BBC and to MSNBC. The LHC is the largest most complex scientific experiment ever created by Modern Man. Our goal should be to scale up to rival SETI@home, at over 450 TeraFLOPS (BOINCstats). My strength is way not I/T. My strength is PR. Anything I can do to help, name it, I will do it.
19) Message boards : LHC@home Science : LHC@Home 2 (Message 23490) Posted 13 Oct 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Yo, Dude, how is the Greater Northwest?
20) Message boards : Number crunching : 14 cores available and no work (Message 23206) Posted 23 Sep 2011 by Richard Mitnick Post: Thanks to whoever checked out the ScienceSprings blog. I appreciate it. I hope you found things of interest.

Next 20

LHC@home