BOINC Atlantic Team Blog

February brought two new team members to the Atlantic team. One of the new recruits brought 986,373 credits which immediately pushed us past 1 million credits. If you follow the Facebook Page, back in May/2011 I put up a graphic showing that the team was originally expected to reach this milestone on 12/04/2014.

I can see that I need to set a new goal for the team. Should it be 5 million or 10 million credits? Let me know.

Since we had such a large influx of credits this month, I’m going to skip presenting the bar graph showing Credit Per Day (CPD) since that has one huge spike that has set every other bar to ground level by scale. Our second highest day of crunching pulled in 12,912 credits which beats our previous high set back in June.

What’s interesting is that often there is no communication from a new member. I’ll log into BOINCStats one day and notice a new name and realize that someone else has joined! I try to give our new team mates a warm welcome, but I don’t always know where they came from. Did they see the Facebook Page, the blog? Sometimes I can see they follow our G+ circle and try to say “HI” to them there.

Up till now I would try to personalize the team by adding their mug shot to our G+ page, but there are only 5 spaces available for pictures there so I’ll have to come up with a new system. Perhaps a “rogues gallery” photo album?

Now let’s take a look at our stats for the month. As you can see, Climate Prediction (CPDN) is getting a very large resource share. In my experience this doesn’t always reflect the actual resource share assigned to a project, it’s usually a coincidence that several tasks were credited in the same time period. Having said that, I would like to encourage my fellow team members to review their settings and make any adjustments that might lead to a more harmonious distribution of project credits. In my early posts I nearly became obsessive regarding the pie chart. I like seeing several pieces, with even resource shares.

By comparison, here is my personal breakdown for February. Look at those nice slices of BOINC pie! Yummy! Now as team leader, I don’t tell the Atlantic team members how to crunch, but if you do support a number of projects I ask that you take a moment to review your resource shares and maybe make a couple of tweaks. I’ve noticed that some projects will generate a lot of tasks while pushing other projects to the background. The BOINC Project Manager does a good job of allocating time, but you still have to provide some direction via the resource share settings at the project website or through whatever site you use as a project manager (e.g. BOINCStats).

At the time of this report, the Atlantic Team provides support for 21 projects, covering all scientific disciplines. 

1. ABC@home
2. Climate Prediction
3. Collatz Conjecture
4. Correlizer
5. DNA@Home
6. Docking@Home
7. EDGeS@Home
8. Einstein@Home
9. Malaria Control
10. MilkyWay@home
11. NFS@Home
12. POEM@HOME
13. Primaboinca
14. PrimeGrid
15. Rosetta@Home
16. SETI@Home
17. SETI@Home Beta
18. SIMAP
19. Superlink@Technion
20. World Community Grid
21. yoyo@home

This evening, I’m heading to a meeting of a local Unix/Linux user group (TWUUG) to make a presentation about the BOINC Project Manager software. As I was researching my presentation, I came across this information about BOINC:

• Active: 284,466 volunteers, 455,949 computers.
• 24-hour average: 5.813 PetaFLOPS.

By comparison, Jaguar has a peak performance of 2.33 petaFLOPS.

The raggedy band of crunchers who form the backbone of the BOINC community do pretty well stacked up against one of the most powerful computers of the modern era.

I’ve worked up a mind map for my presentation which you can view here.