Mega's Boinc Blog

Onward & Upward.

2011-09-16T23:56:00.000Z

Triumph #1
Since the last post I've risen to the giddy height of 107th by Total Credit. Moving at the alarming speed of 38th by RAC I should be top 100 by the end of October. Which will be quite good.

Triumph #2
Is that these gains have been achieved with no new upgrades!
Once I've made top 100 I'll downgrade a little. At present I'm managing just over 2 million per day. Two thirds of this would be more than enough to keep me in or about the top 100.

I'd like to have the basement a bit emptier, a lot cooler and reduce the lecky bill and carbon footprint substantially. Moving beefier GPUs upstairs and selling outmoded CPUs will make the farm more efficient and raise enough dosh to allow for a third i7 machine downstairs. If they were the only 3 PCs in the basement the place would be much more habitable the costs would be less and my CPU capacity would be at least preserved. My plan is to spend nothing new on crunching hardware over the next year.

All Right!!!

2011-07-17T01:05:00.001Z

Woohoo!!!

I'm now, according to Boincstats, 126th overall [Mental but there it is!]

More Glory Hunting

2011-07-05T23:45:00.000Z

Now I got a GTX 590 : The most powerful NVidia card on the planet! Until next week or so.

But it crunches out about 890K credits for Primegrid per day which with the rest of the farm should be enough to net me an average of 2 million per day.

It and the 580, along with one of the bigger ATI cards (I forget the one you lose track) moving, thus retiring a rig with minimal CPU crunching capacity, will altogether allow me to retire no less than 5 GTX 260s which are being redistributed, for a nominal fee to any member of the team interested.

I'm therefore up to 138th by Total Credit and an utterly ridiculous 63rd by RAC. Top 100 by Xmas is looking likely.

And shedding 5 GTX 260s in exchange for a 580 and a 590 (with a PC totally retired) with make the Boinc Basement a tidier, quieter more efficient and possibly cooler place than it was.

So, I lied. And just as well!

2011-06-26T23:19:00.000Z

Okay, so I didn't stick to the PSU only pledge. Somehow [And I make no apology for it - surely the ease of online shopping combined with escalating alcohol consumption in the western world must be one of the few viable prospects for an end to the current global economic crisis!] I found myself acquiring a GTX 580 Nvidia card which raised my Primegrid output to such levels that I'm now 140th in the world by total overall boinc credit and 74th by RAC.

Top 100 status is now a realistic possibility: I've got 369 million and the guy currently in 100th has 493 million.

Leaving aside personal glory, the interests of TSBT have demanded that I up my game as Merlyn has ceased crunching. Grateful though we are to the Welsh Wizard for his contribution to the team his sudden and unexplained quiting of the field has left us likely to drift down the table, though not disasterously.

As well as my own upgrading efforts the return of past Boincers to action armed with new GPU cards offers hope for our future: Robert McLennam & darkmast2 we need more like you. We also need more real Boincers, ordinary computer users donating their spare cycles for science & humanity. If we can get just 1 or 2 percent of the millions of Scottish computers available tp Boinc then it will totally eclipse the efforts of over equipped nutters like me! I'm not quite sure how to reach them however. Ideas please ..

Where am I?

2011-03-31T00:07:00.001Z

Hurrah! I'm 180th in the individual total credit rankings as determined by Boincstats.
This is my highest ever and made possible only by replacing the blown PSUs on two of the basement crunchers.
Apart from replacing further blown PSUs, I'll not be upgrading/repairing the farm beyond what is required to make sure that everyone in the household has a PC that does what they need it to do..

Top 200 again.

2011-01-11T01:13:00.000Z

Hurrah! I'm back at 200 in the world with a personal high a real possibility for the spring/early summer. I must replace the PSU in my dual 260 GTX i7 which stops & restarts every 15 min, no blue screen or anything just stop and start again, so something fundamental seems likely. It's not overheating either as leaving the basement door open & thereby dropping the ambient temp by 15 Celsius doesn't improve things at all.

TSBT aren't doing too badly either. Our graceful retreat from our high of 15th back down to 25th seems to have bottomed out and we are heading back up a few places, all being well.

Personal Glory Beckons!

2010-09-27T00:12:00.000Z

Wow, for the 4th day in a row my output exceeded 500,000. Truly the addition of two new HD5770 video cards has more than doubled my productivity at a modest cost of £350 plus an extra £2 on the household 'lecky bill every day. I'm 228th by total credit and 174th by RAC so I must be in with a reasonable chance of beating my previous best of 182nd place. Charge!!!!

Forum Foul Up

2010-09-18T22:46:00.002Z

Dearie me! What a time I've had of it.

In all the time the Forum has been around I pretty much left it to work. Certainly I never tinkered with MySQL or the phpBB code. This was wise: The following wasn't:

First I made a full [?fool] backup.
I started to footer in an ill-informed, near random, fashion trying to tweak the appearance of the various styles.
I broke all but the board default styles.
As a result I could only visit as a Guest and certainly couldn't do any administration.
In foolish desperation I tried a phpBB re-installation.
This went well until I found out that my 20MB fool back-up was 4 times over the 5MB max back-up size. Arse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Forunately, acute severe paranoia having set in, I had manually, slowly & tediously, renamed the 31 tables in the MySQL database that otherwise had to be over-written in the course of the phpBB reinstallation.
I rerenamed them, manually with all the slow tedium that entails, back to what they had been originally.
This got me back to stage 4.
Rather late in the day I did what I should have done at stage 4, scouring the interweb until I found the files for the broken styles.
Some downloading & ftping later the forum seemed to be whole and complete aside from everyone losing their avatars.

Truly a learning opportunity!

Forum Down

2010-09-18T07:26:00.002Z

Bugger. I tried to upgrade from from phpBB2 to 3 last night. The version of PHP on my webhost wasn't new enough so I decided to do some manual tweaking. It was going quite well. I had the saltire replaced with various versions of the saltire, and was investigating how to add a link, to the homepage when I basically locked myself out!

I can get into the forum but not as registered user, & therefore not as an administrator!!

Fortunately I took a back-up just before I messed it up. Only problem is I need into the admin panel to restore it.

I think I might have to remove & reinstall the whole thing. Any thoughts?

Hurrah! The New Website is here.

2010-09-15T18:46:00.002Z

Sometime about 2am this morning I finally uploaded the Home Page of the New (ish) Website.

It's not finished but still a worthwhile improvement; the horrible cluttered, unmaintainable & out of date stats page has been replaced by a stats section on the home page giving you the only two links you really need & the twitter doohdad works nicely. Best of all it doesn't look like it's had seven shades of ordure beaten out of it with an ugly stick.

Hopefully I'l get some feedback - if people haven't given up on looking at it that is.

New Website Imminent

2010-09-13T22:58:00.003Z

Having long realised that the current website is pretty damn pants I've finally dusted down my HMTL & CSS to try and tidy it up. I think I might have finally cracked it. Once I get the hang of menus that is. Give me another 48hrs.

In breaks from honing my coding skills I've been trying to decorate the Boinc Basement. Problem is there is so much stuff in it that I can only do it a wee bit at a time. I suppose I could switch off the farm for a while but that's a bit extreme innit?

I added another HD 5770 to the farm, replacing the HD3850. Nice! I reckon with CPUs on AQUA, NVidias on Collatz & ATIs on DNETC that I could get half a million per day out of the farm. Mad, totally mad!

Anyway that's got to be an end to the upgrades. From now on it's failure replacements only. A consequence of shifting stuff about the basement is that I can see just how many IKEA Storage Solutions full of PC related shite I have. 23 floppy drive cables at the last count. No day is ever going to be rainy enough to justify keeping them. As for ebaying them... Recycling at last!

Centamegger-hood at last!

2010-08-27T23:50:00.002Z

100,000,000 credits is not a bad tally & one that only 244 boincers have managed before. Clawing my way back to TSBT #2 isn't too bad either, even if the, hopefully temporary, inactivity of Nightlord & JockMacMad are the main things making that possible.

All of this has been achieved without resort to the sort of PC-excess that was a problem before. I'm not as down-sized as I was but from a peak of 10 machines (not including laptops & dodgily borrowed work PCs) I now have 7 PCs (2 of them serving a practical purpose to other members of the household) and no laptops or work PCs being bothered. Together these seven machines have 30 CPU cores, 6 NVidia GPUs & 3 ATI GPUs are allowing me an output of at least 400K per day.

Did some work on the website yesterday. I got the twitter thing working again but the overall effect is to put it politely inconsistent & incomplete. I must get to it.

I'm back!

2010-08-23T23:25:00.002Z

After 16 months I unaccountably felt the need to post again.

Quick update.
TSBT scaled the giddy heights of 15th at one point but are gently floating back down although still crunching mightily. We held UK #1 slot for some months but UK Boinc Team wrestled it back from us. We are closing in on our second billion.

On the personal crunching front I finally managed to get my Boinc Basement built, moving the heat and noise of the farm out of the house, freeing up space for the family and giving me my own playroom.

I've regained the TSBT runner-up slot (steve at 1.2 billion is uncatchable!) and in the next day or two hope to pass 100 million.

Tonight I added my second i7 CPU. Specially for the Aqua crunch.

I must sort the website and get that bloody Twitter widget working properly. It was grand for a while but now seems well knacked.

More on the RAC Increase

2009-04-22T22:40:00.002Z

I think I stopped slightly short of making my point last time, or possibly the post title slightly overstated my point.

Anyhoo my point was that despite a fairly severe pruning of my hardware, my RAC has not dropped much and certainly, seen through the longterm prism of Boincstats-RAC, is remarkably steady. (The surge then drop in raw RAC is mainly due to Milkyway giving me lots of credit in a hurry and then stopping rather than due to the hardware depletions.)

In part this is because I have kept the most efficient bits of the farm. A contibuting factor of course is that GPUGrid has improved it's credit for those who return their results early. Whatever my efficiency is hugely improved which is nice: As well as less noise heat & cost there are far fewer wires which looks much neater and must be much safer!

The Downsizing Continues - The RAC rises!

2009-04-16T22:46:00.004Z

I'm doin' it, I'm doin' it!

Against all predictions I'm successfully downsizing the farm and I've got more plans to become yet more sustainable.

After the last downsize I slipped back a bit, tempted by the charms of Milkyway optimised for top end ATI cards, and acquired an HD4850 card. With up to 70K per day this bagged me a useful 1,000,000 credits before the supply of WUs all but ceased. Within the last 24 hrs I sold this to one of the TSBT young turks.

Also sold in the last week, again to another TSBT bod, complete with the rest of their system gubbins including cases, were two Quads one with a 9600GT and one with a non-boincing GPU (how legacy can you get?). This entailed carting two huge boxes weighing a total of 23kg down to my local Parcelforce depot. Leaving aside the damage to my hernial orifaces, the feng shui of the principal field of the farm has been significantly improved as did the climactic tolerability, my 'lecky bill, my carbon footprint &, with any hope, the noise, both in terms of fans & drives & the PSCAF (persisant spousal critical acoustic factor). The room feels almost empty and my KVM has only half of its 8 ports occuppied.

The reason one of the Quads was sold with a boinc-free GPU was that I discovered that my Phenom sytem supported up to 4 PCI-E cards so, from being a prime candidate for retirement, it got up graded to running two 260s and should, given the recent improvement in GPUGrid credit, be able to return 20K per day and become the Jewel in the Crown of the farm.

So that's the hoose with:
1x E6600 Hopefully soon to be sold as it brings little to the boinc party.
1xQ6600 with 1 x 260 [I think this is upgradable to take another GPU but it will need a better case first]
1xPhenom 9600+ with 2 x 260 [Imagine this with a Nehalem processor & mobo]
1x Q9450 with 1 x 260 [a better mobo allowing another GPU would be a great thing].
1xQ6600 with 1 x 280 [if only it could take another GPU]

Also I have two laptops and a work machine but they don't really matter.
So, despite some radical downsizing I still have a significant croft which, with some modest upgades, signposted above, should, even just running 4 machines, be enough to keep me in the top 200 for weeks to come, and in the top 500 for the foreseeable.

Boinc smarter not harder!

The Downsizing Begins

2009-02-28T00:38:00.003Z

I spoke about downsizing last time but what with winter the thermal imperative was never there. Then when FlyingFocRS sold of most of his farm I just had to bag 3of his PCs mainly for the 260s that 2 of them contained. This got me back up to 8 PCs upstairs! It is obvious as the temperatures outside nudge double figures and those inside head towards 30degC that something has to give. I have therefore decided on a Bill Gates style spree of philanthropy and am giving away my farm, or at least some of the less productive fields, to anyone that will have them. Let me know if you are interested!

The plan will be to be left with 5 quads, 4 with 260 GTX cards and one with a 280 GTX. This, augmented by 2 laptops and my work machine, should be enough to pump out 40K per day. This will be a lot less than the 60K+ I had been managing but still enough to keep me in the top 300 overall individuals for a long time. And at least the lost credits will only have been redistributed within the team.

Already I have dismantled my semi-permanant caseless "test rig" for spares and rid myself of an E6600+9600 which is already propelling another member up the ranks. The drop from 8 to 6 machines means a drop from uncomfortably hot to pleasantly toasty. The roar has also dropped from Heathrow main runway to wind-tunnel which is a big improvement

It's hardly minimalism yet but it feels significantly more sustainable.

Despite some major setbacks - Buster's retiral because of ill health & Nightlord having to downsize severely because of redundancy - TSBT are managing to maintain an RAC above 1/2 a million and have moved up to 40th overall! So no overall downsize.

If you want to score for a buckshee PC let me know- if there is enough competition I'll put the stuff up to a charity auction.

Coding Blues & Farm Plans.

2008-10-07T23:23:00.003Z

I made a new site &, after lots of revisions, it seems to have been well enough received. I've some ideas for the content too. A major frustration has been getting the page centred. I have now figured out how to do that but at the expense of scrambling every element on the page.

I've said it before, but this time I mean it, and t I'm going to downsize the farm to an ultra efficient croft. I reckon with the 2 laptops, [1.5K/d optSeti], my work PC [1.2K/d optSeti], Jo's desktop [4K/day running PS3Grid & OptSeti] and just 3 Quads & a phenom in the farm [together up to 36K on PS3Grid & OptSeti] I could have enough crunching power to get into the top 200 & stay there. Losing 3 machines upstairs would reduce the heat & noise considerably. Selling the spare parts would raise loot which I could use to upgrade the current mATX cases which are so small that they need an awful lot of fast fans to keep them cool. My one full tower is almost silent & it would be nice if they could all be like that. So keep looking on ebay.

WCG is the poor, and also rather standoffish, relation in the SBT family. Nobody loves it and so after only a very brief stay at 100th it has drifted downwards again. I'm going to make it my #1 priority, even after bagging my WCG million to drive us back into the premier league even if it drops my RAC to 30K. The wonder of PS3/Gpugrid is that it frees you up to crunch poorly paid projects as the PS3grid returns dewarf everything else.

10,000,000, A new recruit & A Learning Curve

2008-09-24T23:40:00.002Z

Well I beat Nightlord to 10 million. The fortunes of TSBT may be gauged by the fact that I am only ranked 3rd in the team (4th when Nightlord finally manages to stomp me) but notwithstanding my headlong fall within TSBT I am heading rapidly back to the world top 300 thanks to the miracle of GPU crunching.

The new kid on the team is Merlyn (previously Steve of Boinc UK) who is UK number 1 and whose contributions have added 50% to our output. Realistically we can expect to be top 50 by the end of the year!! Eventually we might manage to make a move on the UK #1 place!

I've decided that my sadly unloved & unlovable TSBT website [which recovered as soon as uploaded my last post] needs a total overhaul. Never having been able to find a decent Website Editor Program I've decided to become a hardcore, Notepad using, HTML/CSS code monkey. At present the learning curve is so steep that I keep falling back down but I think I'm getting the hang of it. So keep reloading that URL.

Website Down & GPUGrid Update

2008-09-14T22:50:00.002Z

Bugger bugger bugger etc. The website is down, so is the Forum and my email. Obviously the weekend cleaner at the hosting company unplugged a server to plug in her hoover! I'll be onto them tomorrow.

Update on PS3/GPUGrid.
It has transformed my fortunes and boosted TSBT no end. I'm churning out about 20K per day on it. A few forays to my local PC shop & on ebay mean that I now have 4 PCs running it. The 260GTX that I got for the frankly rather feeble phenom gets thru a WU in 10 hours and as the value of each has increased to to 3232 that works out at 7760 per day meaning that the runt of the farm can manage 9,000 in total & out-crunch the Ubercruncher: Or at least it could if the ubercruncher hadn't been equiped with a 9800GT which cost 40% of the price of the 260 but manages 55% of its performance. So 3232 ever 18hr means 4300 per day, which added to 3 cores running optimised Seti means 9550 per day. Awesome!!

Awesome too, is the performance of TSBT, returning 100K per day on this one project. Our RAC has risen above 300K and we are going to be top 50 before long!

I'm going to use the miracle of GPU crunching to rationalise the farm: I reckon I can get down to 5 desktops & 2 laptops and still return 35K per day: And finance all the necessary upgrades by selling redundant components.

GPUGrid Works, a Demotion & some more figures.

2008-08-28T21:50:00.003Z

Finally GPUGrid seems to work on Windows. My venerable 8600 takes 45 hrs to do a WU worth 1980ish credits. The rather newer 9600 takes 20 hours. The way it works is the GPU acts as a coproccessor to one of the CPU cores. This makes it an ideal upgrade route for the slower PCs but it wouldn't make much sense for say the ubercruncher where a single core doing optimised SETI can easily outcrunch the 8600 and is almost on a par with the 9600.

I got stomped yesterday by Buster who replaced me as team credit-leader. Cool!

For all you figure fiends here are more numbers for Milkyway & CPDN, each based on just 4 work units, running on the ubercruncher.

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs ____ ______ 300 _____________ 8944
Seti__________ 12.2hrs ___ _______ 374 _____________ 2951
Seti[optimised] _ 5.9hrs ___________ 431 _____________ 7013
Yoyo _________ 42.3hrs __________ 1692 ____________ 3840
CPDN .................. 879hrs ....................... 26749 ........................ 2920
Milkyway .......... 13.6hrs ....................... 784 ............................ 5534

BTW Cosmology has since altered its credit structure since the above and is now much less rewarding!

Quad Back Up

2008-08-07T00:03:00.002Z

I got my stricken quad working again. Only now it's crunching optimised seti so I look forward to at least another 4800 per day from it!!! That is until I figure how to run PS3Grid on it. As well as a top end PSU for it I took the chance to get a decent graphics card for it so that with a little linux black arts I can utilise the GPU as well as the CPU!!!!

In praise of mobile internet.

2008-08-01T22:33:00.002Z

For the first time ever I am able to address you from my country retreat in deepest Argyll, a delightful place but with no phone line and where previously hanging out the front room window got you a single wavery bar of Vodafone reception if you were lucky, and could thole the midgies long enough to complete a call.

Today however, I have 5 rock-solid bars, even from the sofa, & more importantly my USB Mobile Broadband dongle has got me on-line! Okay, so it's just at dial-up, not broadband, speed, and no doubt this will cost me much more than if I got the full contracted speed, only available in our major cities, but who cares? I can post and check my stats & even do non-boinc surfing should I so choose!

Several times over the course of my just completed holiday thru the Utter Hebrides have I been able to get thus online, most strangely on the Isle of Scalpay, a medieval Wee-Free ruled backwater of an island where alcohol is outlawed [yikes!!!] and which lacks all modern amenities, [except sheep] but you can get online from the room of your B&B where every spare surface is covered in admonishments against sin [although come to think of it sheep weren't specifically mentioned].

Anyway it's great that armed with a lap-top & dongle one can get online even in the depths of the Gaeltachd. The 21st century is here & here to stay!

Quad down!

2008-07-22T22:27:00.002Z

As if making concessions to the risk of a fatal paternal hyperthermia wasn't threatening my RAC enough, I tried to fire up the farm again and one of the quads just wouldn't respond. Maybe it's a PSU not quite making the grade anymore, but whatever it is, it is totally deid! It'll be two weeks before I get a chance to sort it. Arse, arse & thrice arse!

Dilemmas, dilemmas!

2008-07-21T22:49:00.003Z

My dad's come to visit. Which in most respects is a positive. But it does bring some dilemmas. Such as how hot and noisy is acceptable for a guest bedroom? As it is I switched 3 of the desktops in the farmyard/guestroom at tea time so that the ambient temp might drop below tropical.

At bedtime the other three went. The silence was just not natural; I didn't like it at all. As I post we have running only Jo's E6600 and the two laptops. Scary!

The next dilemma is how early can you fire them up again. Assuming his slumber survives the racket, it would take at least 3 hours for the room to become dangerously overheated, so a 6am boot up wouldn't be too antisocial, would it?

Is this cheating?

2008-07-20T21:41:00.002Z

Prompted by my anonymous and indeed solitary visitor, I downloaded Crunch3r's optimised Seti application. Boy did it increase my enthusiasm for our biggest project. So far I have contributed just 0.5% of our 28 million. That will change and I hope to be a millionaire in it by Xmas.

Just look at these stats & drool! Or more constructively, and prosocially, download.

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs ____ ______ 300 _____________ 8944
Seti__________ 12.2hrs ___ _______ 374 _____________ 2951
Seti[optimised] _ 5.9hrs ___________ 431 _____________ 7013
Yoyo _________ 42.3hrs __________ 1692 ____________ 3840

As regards the post title: Of course it isn't. Doing the same science in 40% of the time is a major service to the project so getting 250% the credit is only fair.

Why is it never easy?

2008-07-19T23:05:00.002Z

Having established Cosmology as the prefered suitor for the Uberchruncher, the project promptly went tits up, with little work to be had generally and sfa for this very willing host. Just as well then that Yoyo is proving a decent second. At less than half the pay of Cosmo but double the credit of WCG it's useful enough for now & even going half & half with CPDN means that the Ubercruncher is out perfoming the two PCs it replaced by a clear margin.

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs ____ ______ 300 _____________ 8944
Seti _________ 12.2hrs ___ _______ 374 ______________ 2951
Yoyo ________ 42.3hrs __________ 1692 _____________ 3840

Seti Update

2008-07-17T23:41:00.002Z

I finally got enough Seti results to update the table.
It's not bad, unless you compare it with Cosmology!
Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs __________ 300 _____________ 8944
Seti _________ 12.2hrs ___________ 374 _____________ 2951

The Ubercruncher finds a Sugar Daddy

2008-07-17T20:49:00.004Z

Holy Moly! I knew Cosmology would be good but this is stop-the-experiment-I'll-just-stick-with this exceptional. And I happen to like the science of the Cosmology project so it's not even credit-whoring but true project lurve!

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123
Cosmology ____ 3.22hrs __________ 300 _____________ 8944

I'll report on CPDN & Seti once they're done. But for just now, flakey servers and all, I'm sticking with Cosmology on the Ubercruncher. The rest of the farm will of course be mainly doing WCG. For now!

The Ubercruncher does Einstein

2008-07-16T21:18:00.003Z

I couldn't get any work from Cosmology so I did some Einstein. At last we have a clear leader. For now. The Seti test is started & looks as if it might be comparable to Rosetta.

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit _______ Credit/Day
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs ___________ 286 _____________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 _____________ 1877
Einstein ______ 43.8hrs __________ 1425 _____________ 3123

By the way, these tests are all being done on Windows XP professional. Once I've got loads of windows results I'll try it with 64 bit Linux.

The Ubercruncher Sallies Forth.

2008-07-14T20:30:00.003Z

Okay here are some results for WCG now

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit __________ PCPD
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs __________ 286 ______________ 2474
WCG _________ 20.4hrs __________ 399 ______________ 1877

Dearie me. There's no doubt about it WCG - is one seriously stingy project. Once we hit 100 for WCG & I've got my million for it - got my Rosetta one today- then I'm off. Certainly it's no project for credit-whores. So CPDN it is now. You'll have to wait a couple of weeks for the results of that but I'll maybe do some Seti & Cosmology along the way, if the latter sorts out its work flow issues

Dawn of the Ubercruncher

2008-07-13T22:59:00.003Z

Hi y'all.
I thought I'd post again. There's no point in banging on about the fortunes of TSBT, which are thriving, despite half a dozen projects going on strike. The TSBT forum takes care of all that.
No, instead I'll burble on about my personal Boinc quest.

The latest addition to the farm is Q9450 based cruncher with a Gigabyte P35 based mobo and 2Gig of DDR3 Ram which I have overclocked from 2.66MHz to 3.26MHz using a cheapo Thermaltake water cooling system. It replaces a Q6600 on a pisspoor mother board (this CPU will be reused in the fullness) and an AMD 64x2 6000+ (this will be sold ASAP, AMD just aren't competing these days). Finally it gets me down to just 7 desktops in the house!

I'm going to use it as the farm credit-whore & regardless of other targets will run it at whatever gets me and the team the most credits. Of course I need to do some experiments first.

To calibrate it I started it off on Rosetta which I hope to get to 1 million in the next few minutes. My method is to run a batch of WUs, select the final 6, total the time(T) & credit (C) granted and then calculate the projected credit per day (PCPD=(C x 96)/T ). So, the results so far

Project ______ 6WUTime ________ 6WUCredit __________ PCPD
Rosetta _______ 11.1hrs __________ 286 _______________ 2474

Not bad, but I'm sure it'll be beaten. Next up World Community Grid & CPDN.

Happy 2008

2008-01-05T23:58:00.000Z

Happy New Year everyone.

Resolutions for 2008

Relegate personal ambitions to 2nd place to help get all TSBT teams to 100th place or higher.
Get Rosetta, WCG, Seti, & Cosmology to 1,000,000 credits each - that'll be 8 million plus projects.
Reach 10,000,000 overall & stay in the top 500.
Reduce my home PC farm from 10 to 9 machines (including 2 laptops) - upgrades over proliferation.
Sell all the sellable PC bits on e-bay. Recycle everything else.
Lose 2 stones, exercise lots, drink little & go to bed before midnight every night. Aye, right!

Top 100 Campaign

Buster and Nightlord (and in a smaller way, lots of others) have transformed WCG adding an extra 10K per day and moving us from 235th up to 223rd place in a few days. Rosetta is making steady but unspectacular progress with an RAC that would make us 66th and there are immediate prospects of Total Credit gains in the next week. Lots of new members seem to be flocking to join us.

Progress Update

Last update 00:45 16th December 2007
This update 00:30 6th January 2008
Total Active Members 322 (+23)
Recent Active Members 157 (+17)
Total Credit 49,813,936(+2,985,054=136K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (+2)

I'm Back!

2007-12-16T00:24:00.000Z

I couldn't resist it.

So, 9 months on, how is it looking?

TSBT is healthy in the extreme. We've dropped a couple of places, but are higher in RAC ranking than at any time in the last 3 years at 58th.

Last update 23:20 14th March 2007
This update 00:45 16th December 2007
Total Active Members 299 (+66)
Recent Active Members 140 (+26)
Total Credit 46,828,882 (+21,146,566=77.5 K/day our current RAC is nearly twice that!)
Overall Boinc Place 75nd (-3)

On the personal crunching front I've almost totally rebuilt the Farm. I now have 2 E6600s and, even better, 3 Q6600s, all of which have allowed me to rise back into the world top 300 and up to UK 15th. As well as increasing raw power I was aiming to reduce the space taken up by PCs in my house and also the racket and heat they produce.

Nightlord, a former Scotland's Seti member, was good enough to rejoin the team and displace me from team #1. After lots of upgrades I finally got the top place back. In a rare synthesis of cowardice and altruism I plan to sacrifice pole position to him, by running, mainly Rosetta then largely WCG until both these project teams rejoin all our others in the top 100 of teams.

And to crown my happiness there is talk f some moe talented individuals taking over the website. Hurrah!

14 March 2007 Update & Finis.

2007-03-14T23:02:00.000Z

The popular demand for this blog is pretty damn muted & the only comments I ever get are spam. Also I've been neglecting it - three months tut tut. To be honest there's no real need for this blog now that we've got the forum. Also I can't help but think that there are simply too many blogs in the world.

Anyhoo before I switch out the lights here is a final update.

Last update 23:31 12th December 2006
This update 23:20 14th March 2007
Total Active Members 233 (+18)
Recent Active Members 114 (+8)
Total Credit 25,682,316 (+4,873,434=53.0 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (-1)

All of which is pretty good really. Halting the slide at the low 70s is better than I anticipated a year ago when I predicted we might hit 80th as other Boinc teams, slower than us to switch from Seti, caught up.

As regards my own crunching the recent addition of a Conroe E6600 has pulled me into 491st overall and UK 33rd. Nae sae bad!

Anyway I'll be back if there is a clamour for my witterings. Otherwise farewell & thanks for reading (or not as the case may be)!

December 12th Update

2006-12-12T23:25:00.000Z

Thought I'd update this for you loyal souls who keep logging on. Thanks for your interest.

Firstly team news. LHC is still AWOL but we should it back in the New Year. Overall the team is slowly but steadily growing and even moving gradually up the rankings, the membership is growing and we have a nice wee community on the forum. In numbers:

Last update 00:45 8th October 2006
This update 23:31 12th December 2006
Total Active Members 215 (+19)
Recent Active Members 106 (+8)
Total Credit 20,808,882 (+3,704,210 =56.1 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 71st (+2 & more to come)

On the home front my resolve not to tamper with the boinc farm crumbled. I read that the P4-805D was processing power/£ one of the best you could buy and fairly overclockable (it is!) so I bought one [for once PC World was doing a good deal] and what I thought was a suitable LGA775 MoBo. Turned out the MoBo wasn't dual processor compatible so I had to get another one that was. And then of course a 3.2 HT P4 for the board that I'd already bought. Sheesh!

So both my XPs are retired and I've started climbing the rankings again from a low of 540-something to 513 last time I checked. Whoop-dee-doo!

October Musings

2006-10-07T23:32:00.000Z

Still Split

It's a wee bit frustrating that as soon as we changed our name two of our projects, who had always been reliable in this respectstopped exporting their updates for the benefits of the combined Boinc Statistics sites. As a result TSBT (as we insiders like to refer to The Scottish Boinc Team) is still missing 511K credits from Predictor and 83K from LHC.

That aside the name change has gone swimmingly although the following progress will look a bit sluggish because of the temporarily mislaid 593K.

Last update 01:50 10th September 2006
This update 00:45 8th October 2006
Total Active Members 196 (+1)
Recent Active Members 98 (+1)
Total Credit 17,104,672 (+649,060 =22.4 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (-1 but would be +1 without the lost credits)

In fact we are tucking away about 43K per day which for the first time in a long time is significantly more than our rivals "Scotland". Hurrah.

Farm Expansion

Having deretired my XP 3000 I acquired a Mobile XP on ebay to let me make use of an old socket A board and other bits & pieces I have. As a result of this and the revaluing of the BBC trickles I'm managing to hover about 530th in boinc overall. It's tempting to consider how little extra it would take to make me a top 500 contender again. Hmmm... Conroe or cheaper AMD?

Nothing to do with Boinc

Last sunday I saw a red squirrel. This made me happy. Earlier in the day some arsehole broke into my car. This didn't. Funny that.

Hello The Scottish Boinc Team

2006-09-12T23:26:00.000Z

Well we did it. All but one team - QMC -has been renamed. & BoincStats has got all but 600K of the credit gathered together under the new name. Nobody has left in protest.
So that's a good result so far. Hurrah!

Goodbye Scotland's Seti

2006-09-10T00:43:00.000Z

The poll closes in about 22 hrs (I really should be asleep) and with no votes so far for the old name it seems sure that tomorrow we will be called something else - almost certainly The Scottish Boinc Team.

Still it feels like evolution not revolution. After all "only" 9 of our 16 millions have been crunched for Seti. We need to acknowledge that other 7 million in the name.

The switch over might be messy so I will note the eve of change stats:

Last update 00:05 29th August 2006
This update 01:50 10th September 2006
Total Active Members 194 (+2)
Recent Active Members 97 (+12!!! all that emailing paid off)
Total Credit 16,455,612 ((+796,387 =72.4 K/day helped by a CPDN/BBC credit recalculation)
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (static but watch out hungarian dudes!)

Scotland's Seti isn't going, just changing and updating but I'll still miss the old name. I feel like a bride on the eve of her marriage - but I'll never find one at this time of night so why bother to think such disgusting thoughts?

Dearie Me is that the Date?

2006-08-28T22:48:00.000Z

Where does the time go? A shameful seven weeks since I last updated my blog. In my defense I've not been idle.

There's been a fair bit of action on the forum: The name change campaign is in full swing with "The Scottish Boinc Team" currently leading "Scotland's Boinc" & nobody at all opting to keep "Scotland's Seti" which even as a proponent of change I think is a little sad.

I've made a few changes to the website although keeping up with the number of project teams (26 at the last count) to be detailed on the Statistics Page is the sort of challenge that I'm inclined to just avoid.

I've also extended the Boinc Farm by bringing back from retirement an old Athlon XP 3000+ which just needed a PSU & HD to make it useful again. This might slow my decline down the ranks for a little while until I replace everything with Conroes! This gives me 3 cased, & 4 caseless rigs in the main bit of the farm. Just ridiculous - especially in the recent heatwave.

According to Boincstats we lost a great heap of members but I think that this is an accounting artefact. In fact we've gained a few (Hello to Marcus & Dalyplanet) and some long retired members have started crunching again. Particularly welcome was the return after illness of Ian (Buster) Gunn whom I for one had assumed was gone for ever.

Here's how we're doing. Quite well really.

Last update 23:45 6th July 2006
This update 00:05 29th August 2006
Total Active Members 192 (not comparable, something funny on BoincStats)
Recent Active Members 85 (ditto)
Total Credit 15,659,225 ((+1,738,206 =32.7 K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (+1 and further gains likely)

Merger Off

2006-07-06T22:28:00.000Z

After a promising start, when a fair head of enthusiasm for a merger built up, Scotland got cold feet: I think a wish to retain identity and autonomy lay behind it rather than the previous mistrust. So the merger is off and we've to work out how to grow on our own. At least we're all back home and our BBC CCE team is up to 35th in the world.
Now the question is what to call ourselves? "Scotland's Boinc" is the early favourite but I quite like the sound of "The Scottish Boinc Team"

Last update 21:00 24th June 2006
This update 23:45 6th July 2006
Total Active Members 206 (+1)
Recent Active Members 101 (static)
Total Credit 13,921,019 ((+507,670)=41.9K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (static, but World Wide Seti & DPRGI Team Italy are just ahead)

24th June Update - The Merger Begins?

2006-06-24T19:31:00.000Z

Rowpie's been nagging me to update this so here goes.

Merger negotiations are starting in earnest with Scotland, with our opening gambit being 4 of us moving from the SS BBC CCE team to the Scotland one. This practical demonstration of the benefits of merger has been much better received than any earlier abstract discussion ever was. Maybe in a month or so we will have a single unified Scottish team, with nearly 15 Million credits in the bank and earning about 60,000 per day. If it could be done then we would be a top 50 contender in no time at all.

I can see a lot of emailing and forum posting being involved. So far there has been no serious opposition to the idea of a name change on the forum. The wider membership might be more conservative.

The current team position is

Last update 23:45 25 th May 2006
This update 21:00 24th June 2006
Total Active Members 205 (+5)
Recent Active Members 101 (-14) A bit worrying!
Total Credit 13,413,349 ((+742,581)=24.8K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (-2)

Obviously lending 172,ooo credits to another team doesn't help the accounts in the short-term!

On the personal crunching front I've set myself the following priorities (don't ask why I just have):
1.Concentrate on BBC CCE. I've got myself in 41st place overall for it and would hope I could maybe make the top 25.
2.Run LHC@Home for 50% of my capacity if work is available.
3. Run Einstein on my slower PCs until my TC for this matches my CPDN TC and the team breaks 1 million.
4.Then run SETI on the slower PCs to see if I can at least make it to the top 20,000.
Overall I'm holding steady at about 540th, which is still top 0.1%.

May 25th Update

2006-05-25T22:29:00.000Z

Over a month since my last post tsk, tsk!

Anyhow , in that time I upgraded my Boinc Farm with the addition of an AMD Athlon64 Dual Core 4400+! Nice. This has helped halt my decline down the ranks and I'm now dropping about 2 places per week rather than a place per day. I reckon I can keep top 600 for the rest of the year and top 1000 for ever.

The team's doing nicely, holding its own, while not quite managing any major breakthru.

The details are:

Last update 23:55 24 th April 2006
This update 23:45 25th May 2006
Total Active Members 200 (+6)
Recent Active Members 115 (+4)
Total Credit 12,670,768 ((+1,026,042)=33.1K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 71st (-1)

Something that might produce a breakthru would be a merger with the Scotland BBC CCE team. Friendly communication has been established with their leader Ian, who seems to be refreshingly free of the desperate paranoia that afflicts some of his team members.

Snowdog has initiated discussions and a poll on the forum which so far shows that of the few people expressing an interest most of us are broad minded about the prospect of a name change and would like to work with Scotland.

We'll see what happens.

We have lift off!

2006-04-24T22:51:00.000Z

An unprecedentedly excellent 2 weeks, as you'll see:

Last update 00:15 11 April 2006
This update 23:55 24 th March 2006
Total Active Members 194 (+10)
Recent Active Members 111 (+2)
Total Credit 11,644,726 ((+1,570,178)=112K/day!!!!)
Overall Boinc Place 70th (+3)

Most of this has been because of me becoming founder of Seti & Einstein & so being able to contact members who have maybe been with Scotland's Seti for one or two projects but not others. Most of the people contacted so far have been happy to sign up for the team for all their projects. As well as a significant one off boost this has substantially improved our daily average credit. And there's lots more for me to e-mail yet!

Coming to a truce with the Scotland BBC CCE team has also resulted in some of their members, who doing projects other than the BBC joining us for those projects.

Other people are just joining us from nowhere, which is nice. I suppose success begets success.

Hello to: Colin/Colin Paton, KMLogan, Maitland, RAFF, EvilJedi, dtkirk, leeclose, & anyone-else-I've_missed
Farewell to: No-one!!!

10,000,0000, a Lost Bet, Some Trees & New Foundations

2006-04-10T23:01:00.000Z

Busy, busy busy!

We passed 10 million credits, which was nice.

I bet the Scotland team of the BBC CPDN Project that they couldn't get a new leader appointed in place of their lost founder. They did and I lost, or at least transferred to a worthy cause, £200 so that trees for life (link right) could restore the carbon fixing glory that was the Caledonian forest.

Inspired by them getting a new leader I managed to get myself appointed leader of our Seti@Home & Einstein teams. Although there is no mechanism for it, it is just a matter of asking the right people nicely.

Meanwhile we go from strength to strength, gaining a member a day, and with many more active members. I've tried to capture the comings and goings, my apologies to anyone I've missed.

Last update 23:40 27th March 2006
This update 00:15 11 April 2006
Total Active Members 184 (+10)
Recent Active Members 109 (+14)
Total Credit 10,074,548 ((+382,276)=27.3K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (-1)

Hello to: Paul, Greenglen, marineris, ScB, Sheridon, ShazzaDouglas/Lady Shaz, Boris mk2, Alex Ball, BadgerWI, dad, Sammy, Paul, Tony Pattinson, sQuonk,
Farewell to: Kevin Dawe, SSGlobalUnion,

Update 27th March

2006-03-27T22:29:00.000Z

Last update 23:15hrs 9th March 2006
This update 23:40 27th March 2006
Total Active Members 174 (+3)
Recent Active Members 95 (+7)
Total Credit 9,692,272 ((+385,335)=21.4K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 72th (static)

Sorry about the delay since the last entry but as the forum has begun to take off that has kept me busy. If you've not tried the forum get there now and sign up. Reading my occasional ravings is all very well but it's not real communication! As you can see all the recent activity has been very helpful in building the team again. There has been a modest increase in the total members but the number of people active in the last month has risen quite significantly. By the way don't worry about the apparent drop in daily productivity - this is just because SETI, our biggest project hasn't updated it's stats in 2 days - it happens.

A new project is the BBC Climate Change Experiment. As far as I can see this is good old fashioned Climate Prediction Boinc sexed up to appeal to the telly watching masses: Elitist prejudices aside, there is nothing wrong with that if it gets people interested in distributed computing & indeed the project is proving very popular. We noticed that a team called "Scotland" had been set up and was doing quite well. Now it seems a shame to have rival Scottish teams splitting the Scottish effort so I visited the BBC CCE forum and suggested a merger. This innocent proposal proved to be as popular as a turd in a swimming pool and I got thoroughly flamed.

Having had the hand of friendship savagely hacked off I did set up a Scotland's Seti team for this project which you can join or not (please don't get angry it's just an option).

Who'd be a spammer?

2006-03-20T22:43:00.000Z

Tonight I've been mainly typing addresses into my Outlook Express address book.
I got over 50 addresses from the Einstein@Home team website -as team founder I can see such stuff- and with way too much fiddly cutting & pasting made a group. I then composed an inspirational e-mail and pressed the send button.
Bums! My server rejected the message on the grounds of "too many recipients". It doesn't like any more than 12 (c'mon, I'd have to be a really ambitionless spammer to want to spam just 13 people). However after lots more cutting and pasting I made 5 groups and finally sent my message 5 times. You may have got it. Hopefully lots of lapsed members will have also and will flock back to us like lost sheep redeemed.
So now, before bed, I will update the website at last.

We've got a forum!

2006-03-12T01:03:00.000Z

Snowdog has come to the rescue and set us up a splendid new forum -the link is on the right. So rejoice, sign up and start communicating as if we weren't all Autistic Spectrum Disorder geeky types!
I'll revamp the website to make this, very welcome, development central to our efforts sometime very soon.

Onwards & Upwards-ish.

2006-03-09T22:56:00.000Z

Last update 23:55hrs 1st March 2006
This update 23:15hrs 9th March 2006
Total Active Members 171 (+1)
Recent Active Members 88 (+1)
Total Credit 9,306,937 ((+185,354)=23K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 72th (-2)

As predicted, we've slipped back a bit, not because we're doing badly, but just because a couple of other teams have powered past us: I don't anticipate being overtaken by anyone else before we hit 10 million. We could, with only a marginal raising of our game, even overtake World Wide Seti. Anyhow, it's the taking part that counts, and we're certainly doing that.

Thanks to FlyingfocRS, a Scotland's Seti stalwart of old, who has become the third member of uFluids team, this, the youngest of our teams, is now the highest placed (albeit against a meagre field) in 39th place.

T

March Update

2006-03-01T23:49:00.000Z

As a new month, and a new season if you believe the Met Office, dawns the team stands as follows:

Last update 23:00hrs 24th Feb 2006
This update 23:55hrs 1st March 2006
Total Active Members 170 (+1)
Recent Active Members 87 (-3)
Total Credit 9,121,583 ((+104,796)=21K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 70th (static)

So, healthy enough. We still have a trickle of new members and are holding our own in 70th.

Without a recruitment drive, people and machines, we might expect to slip a little over the next few months, maybe to about 80th. This is because by and large we were early switchers from Seti Classic to Boinc. Now the big hitting teams have been forced to make the switch they are beginning to overtake us.

It's a bit like my own crunching rankings: I bailed out of S@H in about 1970th place, then quickly rose to 214th for Boinc but since then I have, despite gradually increasing my productivity, sank to 450th. My RAC placing is 919th (and that's with my friends' Sempron doing it's "burn in test") so my long term goal is to hold on to a top 1000 placing.

As regards uFluids, I finally made the top 100 (98th) and the team (all 2 of us) are 42nd. One for Hitch-hiker's Guide fans to savour.

The message of the post is RECRUIT!! Scotland's Seti Needs You. I'm off to find the e-mail addresses of inactive members to bully them into getting going again. You do what you can.

Latest Score = Nine Million

2006-02-24T22:47:00.000Z

Well done everybody. We made it to 9 million and will soon be in 8 figures. We continue to accrue new personnel. The details are below;

Last update 23:40hrs 16th Feb 2006
This update 23:00hrs 24th Feb 2006
Total Active Members 169 (+4)
Recent Active Members 90 (+3)
Total Credit 9,016,787 ((+177,750)=22K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 70th (static)

My own Boinc farm has been augmented by a Sempron 3100+which I've built for a couple of friends and will be testing for a few days. Call me a sad geeky git, I'll not deny it, but there are few pleasures like slotting together various bits and finding that you've successfully brought another computer into the world.

On a less satisfying note, my internet car selling has all turned a bit sour. The buyer, who is in the motor trade, now claims that the car, which he inspected & drove 500 miles home, and on which I had spent nearly £500 making sure that the body work was as good as new, has body work defects which, "if I'd spotted them at the time I'd have walked away", and "really it should cost £1800 to sort out but my mate will put it right for £300". None of these however show up on the photographs that I've invited him to send me as "it's too shiney!" All of which invites a four word reply, making condensed but witty metaphorical reference to coitus, travel & mortality, but which I have so far resisted in favour of civilised negotiation.

Finally I'm a wee bit dissapointed to see that my blog is only getting a couple of hits per day. Still, given the number of Blogs around it was probably unrealistic to expect this one, however exquisite my insights into distributed computing, and, however exciting the other meagre glimpses of my life I offer you, to become required cult reading overnight. C'est le internet!

I've got a counter!

2006-02-19T22:49:00.000Z

Like I say, I've got a counter. Puerile, but it makes me happy!

You'll be pleased to hear that my car selling exploits went off happily. The man gave me a huge wad of notes that triggered the "Excuse me for asking, but are you a drug dealer or other gangster, sir?" script when eventually I could find a still functioning branch of the Clydesdale Bank (on-line banking is great but of limited use when you want to unburden yourself of an armfull of low denomination notes). By the way, "No I've just sold a car for cash." is quite a good reply, especially if you are a drug dealer or other gangster.

The team is doing not badly and acquiring members somehow - another 3 since the last post. Nice!

Update 16th Feb

2006-02-16T23:33:00.000Z

Okay-dokay, here's where we are compared to where we were:

Last update 00:00hrs 7th Feb 2006
This update 23:40hrs 16th Feb 2006
Total Active Members 165 (+2)
Recent Active Members 87 (-3)
Total Credit 8,839,037 ((+259,992)=26K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 70th (static)

So the good news is that more people are joining the team (welcome, whoever you are) but the bad news is that some members, while not leaving the team , are ceasing to be active crunchers.

On the personal crunching front, I had a wee embarassmentette when a 3.06 Hyperthreading P4 CPU I bought on eBay to replace a 2.4 NonHT P4 turned out to be for laptops only and so was FAU. That'll teach me to read the adverts properly.

However, this eBaying disappointment was offset by selling my car for £5710. So I'm off to the airport tomorrow to meet a a bloke from 500 miles away who wants to pay a huge amount in cash for a car he's never even seen: I can only assume that he is; (a) a money launderer; (b) a counterfeiter; or (c) has more faith in human nature than a cynical old git like me.

State of the Team Feb '06 (Psst...Wanna Buy a Used Car?)

2006-02-06T23:23:00.000Z

Just to move briefly off-topic, and steering dangerously close to self interest, I've just embarked on my biggest internet adventure yet, trying to sell a moderately valuable car on e-Bay. (Follow the link on the right if you're interested.) Last time I tried anything like this it was a knackered old Fiesta on QXL (you're probably too young to remember them) and the dodgy geezer that won it never paid up. Hopefully e-Bay 2006 has rather more robust procedures than QXL 2000.

Boinc-wise the team plods on having settled into 70th place which, with the current members and productivity is roughly where we will be for a while. This isn't bad but we could do better. In order to boost our profile I've asked for links to our sites to be added to the official Boinc Website links page.

I've not quite given up on u-Fluids yet but am only running it half time on one PC. Even so I've got to 134th place and the team is up to 50th. It's still only Snowdog and me in the team. This may be understandable & wise considering the problems I've had.

To return to the note of ego-centricity on which I started this I've renamed the Blog in my honour, because I want to & I can, basically.

Finally I've not the hang of tables so here are some very brief facts about the state of the team as of now (nb recent = the last month):

00:00hrs 7th Feb 2006
Total Active Members 163
Recent Active Members 90
Total Credit 8,579,045

I will try & update this and comment on changes every few weeks.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

2006-01-31T22:29:00.000Z

I am!

I crunched my one millionth credit today: the first in the team to do so (although at least 3 others could join me by the end of the year); the 40th in the UK; and the 422nd overall to do so.

Not too shabby or what?

uFluids Dissappointment

2006-01-30T23:40:00.000Z

I'm surging up the uFluids ranks (top 400 already & dragged the team, ie Snowdog & moi, up 19 places to 66th) so I should be pleased. But I'm not, as my overall prodctivity has plummeted from about 3000/day to 1200/day.
Now, some of this is due to to me having quite a lot of credit pending for E@H as well as uFluids (nearly all of this should be allocated to me in due course, although now I remind myself, Predictor@Home has owed me 1300 credits for months now, grr...). The main problem, however, is that the uFluids program just doesn't seem to work properly on some of my machines.
What seems to be happening is that some workunits are completing and disappearing and I get neither credit nor pending credit. My computers divide clearly into the produce and produce-nots so as a preliminary measure I'm detachng the program on the latter, and will be watching the others carefully.
Anyway, with my productivity restored I hopefully will become a boinc millionaire tomorrow. :-)

uFluids Update

2006-01-27T21:02:00.000Z

So far so good.
I got joined up & got some work without any hassle (not always easy with the smaller projects). After less than a day & running the project part time I've got 157 credits (twice as much pending) and lie in 1169th place (admittedly out of 1591 productive users). The team's up 1 spot to 85th as well.

Lets see if I can make the top 100 within a week! Or would that just be showing off?

uFluids Project

2006-01-27T00:25:00.000Z

I've probably risen as far in Einstein (85th) and CPDN (162nd, I used to be 74th you know) as I'm going to so I think I will add to my portfolio the uFluids project. This is one of the smaller projects. So far the only member of the Scotland's Seti team is Snowdog. On his own he has brought the team to 86th place with 2086 credits. It shouldn't be be too hard to make rapid progress up the ranks in a small scale newish project, so come on give it a go. The project URL is http://www.ufluids.net//

State of the Team 22 Jan 06

2006-01-22T23:26:00.000Z

Hmm....

Just tried to do a post setting out a few stats in tabular form about the team. Looked fine until I previewed it when it became obvious that this post editor thing is WYSIWYG-NOT. Totally unreadable so I'll give up for tonight. Any advice on getting tables into these things?

It works.

2006-01-16T20:44:00.000Z

Thanks to all those kind enough to have bothered to visit the site & especially comment on the blog.
News-wise Scotland's Seti have passed the 8,000,000 CS mark although we've slipped back to 67th place. Which is still pretty good out of over 39000 teams: In particular we are one of few teams to be top 100 for all 4 main Boinc Projects).
Now I know I've got an audience I'll set to building the under construction pages and also get advertising the team.

Happy New Year/Happy New Website

2006-01-01T21:11:00.000Z

The new website is launched on time and fairly complete. Hope you like it, or at least see it. I await comments with baited doodah.

Progress Being Made

2005-12-29T21:55:00.000Z

Yesss! Robbie & Allan followed me (flattering guys, but creepy) and the sudden transfer of credit has moved the team up 6 places overall (70th to 64th) and shifted our climate prediction ranking from 79th to 52nd. A great team is reborn (or something).

The new website is almost done. I've gone for a clean simple design with none of the celtic knotwork or stuff I had previously. It should be ready to go live on the 1st or 2nd of January (with a few bits still "under construction").

First Post Good Intentions

2005-12-27T20:07:00.000Z

Several weeks of radio silence now: I must do something to revive Scotland's Seti. The bulletin board that Josh did has disappeared as have his trickles of results. Having been with it for 5 and 1/2 years I miss the team, and the two others I've joined haven't had much craik about them.
I can't rebuild the bulliten board but I can manage a blog and I can just about revamp the web page.
First thing I suppose is to get all my Boinc accounts back with Scotland's Seti. I wonder if my stalkers "Robbie and Alan are going to get you no point running DJJW!!!" will follow me again. It's good for the team if they do. They might even notice that DJJW has reverted to being called Megacruncher.