Posts Tagged ‘BOINCAtlantic’
Atlantic Team Update for April 2013
To move or not to move… that is the question.
This blog is hosted at WordPress.com and considering that it is free hosting, I have nothing to complain about. In fact, my experience with WordPress customer service is excellent. The pressing issue is that the boincatlantic.net domain used for this blog will expire at the end of May. I’ve got a couple of WordPress sites where I maintain dual domains and that is an extra personal expense I need to consider. Money isn’t the only factor, I also think that having one domain for the blog, and another for the website is counter-productive. If I really want to increase exposure for our team and build support for volunteer computing I should focus on a single site that gets more traffic, and is listed higher in search results, right?
The deadline approaching for the domain renewal is more of a call to action, forcing me to finally make a decision I should have made months ago. I need to consolidate the Atlantic Team websites, into a single website.
When I created the team website (boincatlantic.org) the site was also a training platform for me to learn HTML/CSS and so that site has an “old school” look and feel. I still have a lot to learn but that site really hasn’t been the training tool I had planned because it is the public face of our team and I don’t want to “experiment” on it constantly. That just looks bad – so I haven’t really used that site as a training tool. I have a LAMP server I built for that so I don’t have to work on a live site as I’m learning something new. I’m not a fan of flashy websites and the simple “HTML” look of the website is just fine with me, but I maintain other sites using Drupal and I find that adding features and maintaining sites is much easier with a decent CMS (Content Management System).
I’ve concluded that continuing to maintain the boincatlantic.org site as an HTML training site doesn’t really sync with the goals of promoting the Atlantic Team and volunteer computing.
The decision presented by the expiration of the boincatlantic.net domain name has become a little more complicated. It’s not just a matter of “To renew or not to renew…” but a consolidation of two websites that have evolved independently of each other. The sad fact is that it probably won’t be that easy to migrate any content from this blog to a new site, particularly since I will probably use a different CMS (Drupal vs. WordPress). Of course that doesn’t mean the information on this site will vanish, it will just revert to the default WordPress domain name: boincatlanticteam.wordpress.com
Of course I could have planned for all of this since I knew the date domain would expire, but what fun would that be? Now the clock is ticking and I’ve got less than a month to build a new Atlantic Team website that incorporates the blog. One little fly in the ointment is that the boincatlantic.org team website is hosted with a different company than my other websites and that hosting plan expires March 3, 2014. Now I could just follow my standard procedures and put off the decision to move hosts until the renewal is due, but maybe I should also take this opportunity to consolidate all of my web properties under one hosting plan.
See how a simple decision to renew a domain name has escalated into quite a bit more. Nothing on the Internet is as easy as it appears, is it?
At this time I have two sites that “run on” Drupal and I’ve been building experience with that CMS. In other sites, I’ve used modules to create forums, and aggregate RSS feeds and I think these would make great additions to our team website. Most of the projects have an RSS feed they use to post updates and being able to bring those together on the team website would encourage site visitation and help us all stay informed about what is going on with various projects. Team members are no strangers to our G+ or LinkedIn pages, so maybe a forum is not really needed at this time but it’s nice to know that it could be added later if needed without disrupting the entire site.
As things progress, I’ll post regular updates to the team G+ page, and I’ll update this blog with the final status whenever I sort it all out… by the end of May, right?
And now for our regularly scheduled monthly report…
Atlantic Team – Credit per Day
Atlantic Team Credit as of 4/30 – 138,311,037. Very nice job everyone! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
Atlantic Team Update for February 2013
As I write the monthly report for February I’m confronted with our total for the first day of March. A fantastic figure! Our best day ever! And I will write about that next month since this is the report for February.
Atlantic Team Credit Per Day: February
In the month of February the Atlantic Team racked up 19,539,699 credits so the team PWNED January’s 13,735,366 credits and we are off to a great start for 2013. Everyone is doing a fantastic job, we have no new team members to report.
Personally, I’ve been working through some technical issues trying to get BOINC to recognize my GPU on a regular basis. For a while it seemed ok, then I don’t know what happened. Maybe an update or something (I run LInux) and after that sometimes I’ll boot and BOINC will recognize the GPU, others it won’t. So my personal credits have been pretty low with some spikes when the GPU kicks in.
I found a post at Overclock.net that I though solved the problem by changing the sleep delay. This seemed to solve the problem initially, now I’m back to intermittent GPU functionality. I haven’t had much time lately to dig into it and with Linux you never know when an update might come through that might fix/break the delicate BOINC/GPU balance so it will have to wait till I have more time to sort out a permanent solution.
Team member Adam Yusko still blogs about his experiences crunching BOINC projects at his blog, Crunching for Science.
Distributed computing even got a mention in an article at ZDNet titled: Distributed computing for the greater good which includes a reference to BOINC so perhaps some new crunchers will be joining the cause.
This month, the World Community Grid circulated a survey. If you crunch WCG projects, the survey will be emailed to the account you used to register with WCG. I’m sure they would appreciate it if you take a few minutes to respond.
Thanks to the Atlantic Team members for another record month for 2013. Keep on crunching!
Atlantic Team Update for December – 2012 In Review
This was a great year for the Atlantic Team. We added several new members, and many of them also upgraded their systems during the year adding GPU cards. As more projects add tasks that support GPU’s this gives our crunching power a real boost.
| December | 2,941,706 |
| November | 4,340,874 |
| October | 4,099,760 |
| September | 4,036,672 |
| August | 3,516,189 |
| July | 4,335,760 |
| June | 2,287,339 |
| May | 804,956 |
| April | 1,436,529 |
| March | 1,178,192 |
| February* | 986,373 |
| January | 126,862 |
| 2012 Total Credits Crunched: | 30,091,212 |
According to BOINCStats, at the time of this report our credits were: 29,495,025.09 so I’m not sure why there is a 504,975 credit discrepancy since I copy the monthly credits directly from BOINCStats. It’s possible I fudged up the figures in February since I listed the credits brought by a new team member but seem to have omitted the actual credits earned for that month. Either way, it’s a very respectable figure for our small team, and I thank everyone for their efforts and contributions to scientific and medical research through volunteer computing.
In previous posts throughout the year I’ve discussed changes I’m planning for the team website and as my HTML/CSS coding skills improve the actual implementation of those plans is getting closer. I’ve been collecting the XML stats data for the team since 07/07/2012. The BOINC site has some scripts that can be used to implement stats pages so when I get a better handle on JavaScript, PHP and MySQL I can incorporate the team stats in our own website. Of course Willy at BOINCStats still provides one of the best sites for viewing project data and managing multiple systems using BAM!
Best wishes to you and your family in 2013! Keep on crunching!
Atlantic, the International BOINC Crunching Team
Welcome to the Atlantic Team monthly report for November 2012!
Before I get into the typical monthly report stuff, I want to welcome Gert from Canada to our enthusiastic team of crunchers! Welcome Gert!
As I look over our membership listing at BOINCStats I am proud to see that so many nationalities are represented in our small team. In earlier posts I’ve written how the original target membership were the players of an online game, and the team named was selected based on a specific shard (game server). So the original membership idea was very limited. As you probably know from personal experience, getting folks to crunch BOINC projects can be difficult. To us it seems simple, even logical to let out computers do something useful during their idle time. When it became obvious that recruiting members from such a limited audience wasn’t going to work, I decided to open the Atlantic Team to everyone. The only requirement is enthusiasm for crunching projects and a willingness to try new things.
One of the early International members (David De Zwirek/Israel) challenged me to explain why he should join a team named Atlantic, rather than one for his own country. So I came up with the following guidelines for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If the waters of the Atlantic Ocean touch the shores of your country – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If you have ever traveled by plane or ship and flown over, or traveled through the Atlantic Ocean – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If you subscribe to or have ever read a publication with “Atlantic” in the title such as The Atlantic – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If you have ever visited a website with “Atlantic” in the title such as The Atlantic – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If you have ever eaten seafood that was caught in the Atlantic Ocean – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
- If you are reading this blog – you qualify for membership in the Atlantic Team.
After reading this, if you realize that you qualify and would like to join the Atlantic Team, look for “Atlantic” under the team listings at your favorite project(s). The team is registered with BOINC-Wide Teams so it should be listed in all projects, but if you join one and don’t see it listed, shoot me a note at info (at) boincatlantic (dot) org and I’ll get that straightened out.
The growing International membership of our team has caused me to think about new ways to engage members that may not list English as their primary language. I plan on implementing some changes to the website and blog and may request assistance from team members or others with skills in different languages to translate the following:
- The Atlantic Team Mission Statement on the team website.
- The team description on the website.
- A “Welcome Message” that will be sent to new members including links to our sites like G+, Facebook, blog, etc. and methods of contact.
There is a contact form on the team website which you can use if you would like to volunteer for any of the translation projects. If you are interested, please contact me first as I may wish to make changes to the documents prior to translation. Thank you.
Atlantic Team Credit per Day: November 2012
Now let’s get down to business. The team racked up 4,340,874 credits this month. We seem to have settled in nicely at the 4 million credit per month level. Very nice! Thank you for your efforts.
Active yet humble team member Devin Blakely has crunched over 15 million credits. Devin didn’t even notice his accomplishment until I pointed it out. As a team we don’t compete against each other, it’s all about supporting the projects but I wanted to give Devin kudos for his accomplishment as he’s always there when team members need help on the G+ circle. To Devin, there is no “i” in “Team” just all those other letters and stuff.
Team member Adam Yusko is an avid GPUGrid cruncher and asked that the team join the December of the living dead challenge at BOINCStats. While it’s an odd choice for a title, the goal is to focus on providing support for GPUGrid projects that contribute to biomedical research. If you have a GPU equipped system, please join in the team effort for this challenge.
Thanks to all who have joined the team and I appreciate your continued support! Keep on crunching!
Atlantic Team Update for October
October was a steady month for the team. Cooler weather means some members will allow more run-time for their systems so I expect that as Winter approaches we may see a boost in earned credits. This month we pulled in 4,099,760 credits so we are maintaining momentum on those 4 million credit months. Good job team!
Credit per Day: October
I’m not quite sure what happened on September 23, but it looks like everyone took the day off! This isn’t unusual though since tasks don’t always take the same time to complete and it’s not unusual for results to get pushed out in lumps. This month I re-deployed two Windows systems and one is GPU-enabled so I experienced some down-time while I was re-configuring the OS’s for those systems. However after looking at the monthly total, the GPU’s are great at quickly making up for lost ground and I’ve had the GPU system focused on those tasks since the re-build.
This month myself and other team members were excited to start receiving work on the new World Community Grid GPU projects. Sadly one of my NVIDIA GPU’s is not supported and it doesn’t seem that the Linux systems can take advantage of these tasks either. Perhaps one of my team members had better luck. They are one of the best-managed project hosts and it’s good that WCG has started to offer GPU enabled projects.
Speaking of Linux, I’m currently configuring a system to run CentOS. This Linux distro doesn’t use the same package repositories as the other distros I use so I will have to learn how to install BOINC from the command line. I’ve done a bit of preliminary Google’ing on this and so far there don’t seem to be any tutorials for CentOS though there do seem to be some folks running BOINC on this OS. I’ll have to keep decent notes while I sort it out and perhaps provide my own tutorial in a future blog post.
Atlantic Team member Adam Yusko continues to blog about his experiences using BOINC at his blog Crunching for Science, please visit.
I plan on updating the BOINC links offered on the sidebar of this blog so keep an eye on those. There will be a section specifically for Atlantic Team resources that will list our Facebook page, Google+ page, LinkedIn Group, Website and Twitter feed.
With cool weather coming fast I’m thinking of some kind of team challenge. I realize many members avoid 24/7 operation during the summer due to heat and utility expense issues so perhaps Fall or Winter are good times for a challenge.
Keep on crunching!
Atlantic Team Update for September
Credits for September: 4,036,672 – Nice!
September was another record-setting month for the Atlantic Team. On 9/18 we broke our previous record for most computed credits in a day when we hit 309,364 credits.
What makes this stand out is that a couple of team members (including myself) have been working through equipment issues or making changes to systems so you would think that our stats would be down for the month. All of that heavy crunching has also put us over 19 million total credits and after reviewing previous monthly reports it looks like the team has raised the bar again with 4,036,672 credits earned.
The team added a new member this month. Welcome Ritam! Thanks for joining the Atlantic Team. I hope you stop by and say “HI” on the Facebook or Google+ pages. If you have any questions, the G+ page is a good place to ask as it’s checked frequently by members of the team. If you’re on Linked In please join the BOINC Atlantic Team group there.
Atlantic Team: Credit Per Day – September
Looking at the chart you can easily spot our new record day. Good job team!
Team member Adam Yusko is still pursuing his dream of crunching on a Rasberry Pi. Adam writes about his personal experiences crunching BOINC projects on his blog: Crunching for Science
I got on my soapbox last month and wrote that “Conversion is the Key” and suggested ways we could attract new members. I plan on making some changes to the website and blog to help make it easier for folks to learn about volunteer computing and crunching BOINC projects. I didn’t get a chance to implement those changes yet so rather than write another long blog post, I’ll just say: “Ditto what I said last month!”
Thank you Atlantic Team for keeping those CPU’s and GPU’s humming and supporting volunteer computing projects. There is a lot of good work being done by these projects and our support is crucial.
