2020 Formula Boinc Sprints

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Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
1,090
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That makes me think the "coalition" voted for Cosmology, so he cancelled it since the project server has been broken (out of disk space) almost all week.
The voting page was non functional leading up to it according to some posts on the Formula BOINC forum. My guess is Sebastien didn't realize the voting page was down until it was ready to announce the Sprint and then bailed on it because nobody had the chance to vote, but that's pure speculation on my part. I would have thought it'd be more likely just to pick a project at random at that point, but the choices are pretty limited. Hard to say.
 

Orange Kid

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,323
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I think with all the controversy of late, the sprints are done for the year.
I will be surprised to see if FB is even back next year.
 
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VietOZ

Member
Aug 3, 2019
98
139
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AFAIK we're still kickin'
You guys should be concern about P3D instead because we moved our yearly honor run for Movieman back to his birthday in February. DA's statement was true, not a single WU was aborted. And the damn ODLK's server didn't go down neither. Calling us out ain't doing any good. We looked at the performances and respect from there. Not the trash talking.
Sure, your dual Epyc/s made some noise. I lost hands down.I can't say sheit in it. But that doesn't mean we're scared of you ... or anyone in the planet.
Imagine OZ on P3D? ... yah ... not good calling us out. Shoulda recruit me instead :D
Hint: I don't like P3D neither

When the price is right :D j/k

Huey Lewis
 
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SystemVipers

Member
May 18, 2013
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I'm just tired of all this your doing this and bla bla bla
You guys here like to have someone to blame, Were not your boogieman. This is sport not pattycake or marbles, take your lumps like men just like we do.
You had a good run but beat us late on that last sprint, and guess what, we congratulated you, grow up, the end game is we are helping humanity and
using are hard earned to pay for it, because we want to help, If you join FB, guess what it's sport, so we are going to win or at least give it our best.
There's no collation or secret cabal, in fact we always told you what we do and were doing before or after the sprints, Plus we know you can see mostly what's going on in the stats pages.
But again seems you must have some conspiracy if something goes down, things don't work out or you guys just can't get it together then you Pivot and blame XS.
But I guess the biggest reason is were more user friendly then you guys, seems your team isn't too well liked and now your trying to project that on us.
That's a Trumpism I learned this election, got no real facts, everything points back to your own actions, well Pivot and blame someone else.

The fact is we are a solid team made up of good people that like to help, we offer help, try to help and even help if it means a lot to someone and we feel that.

But FB will never be gone, I think the last 2 years have shown that it needs to do 3 things, rewrite the code, get better at servicing us the crunchers and talk to the Server managers of each program that commits to FB on a regular basis and make them commit to some terms. We can help them to get involved. Make them checklists and let them know when they can be chosen and what to check. We have a lot to offer lots of WU's in just 4 days. Even if the FB owner doesn't step up soon, people have offered to help. If not I'll write one myself, so no worries here.

In conclusion being Crunchers we are in a category of mostly type 1 personalities (thanks SaM) and we all like to win, so take the whining out and put that to work making this competition a better event, No bunkering, it gets announced and we go. Make a better way of choosing events, some kind of random generator or something, and every week let every program know that they could be chosen this week.

I don't come here much, but I know deep down that this is a solid and good hearted team, so lets act like one.

Steve - SystemViper - XtremeSystems 4ever
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
5,459
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Calling us out ain't doing any good.
I'm just tired of all this your doing this and bla bla bla
You guys here like to have someone to blame,
Err, what are you talking about?

I talk about bluestang and Dark Angel posting about a myth that Team AnandTech members download tasks with the intention of never completing them.

[I already resonded to blustang in the RakeSearch forum when he posted this lie there. I am not reaching out to Dark Angel in the FB forum because I am not registered there.]


--------
Edit,
hmm, maybe you responded to earlier posts here, not mine.

Edit 2,
My memory was wrong about the RakeSearch post. It wasn't bluestang's. Apologies to bluestang.
 
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Dark Angel

Junior Member
Nov 14, 2020
1
0
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(FB forum, Oct 12)

Have flat-earthers taken over at XS now?
No.
And I'm here, on your turf, calling your team out for dirty play. TaaT is well known for deliberately choking project servers when you're ahead on sprints to prevent other teams from returning completed work. You do it by effectively DDoSing them, ie downloading massive amounts of work you have no intention of completing, aborting it, then downloading again and again. It's a tactic used by your team members every time you get even a hair in front on any sprint. You're also hypocrites, bleating and crying when other teams help each other while you do exactly the same thing and have been doing it for a long time. You team-hop when it suits you and cry about it when someone else uses your own tactics against you.
Call ME a "flat earther"? You're pathetic.
 

biodoc

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2005
6,257
2,238
136
No.
And I'm here, on your turf, calling your team out for dirty play. TaaT is well known for deliberately choking project servers when you're ahead on sprints to prevent other teams from returning completed work. You do it by effectively DDoSing them, ie downloading massive amounts of work you have no intention of completing, aborting it, then downloading again and again. It's a tactic used by your team members every time you get even a hair in front on any sprint. You're also hypocrites, bleating and crying when other teams help each other while you do exactly the same thing and have been doing it for a long time. You team-hop when it suits you and cry about it when someone else uses your own tactics against you.
Call ME a "flat earther"? You're pathetic.

That's complete nonsense. No one on our team would ever stoop to such tactics.
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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BTW, one tactic which I evidently engage in frequently is to report many of my results very late in a competition.

For a long time, I would do so at some point on the last day, but many hours before the end of the contest — because of the risk involved in doing that too late.

It is no secret that I waited until the last hours of some of the recent FB sprints. Why would I take this risk? It's exactly because members of some teams routinely hop between teams, and I wanted to withhold information to these people as long as feasible.

Edit: added emphasis
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
5,459
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I don't think any one team has the power to choke project servers.
Some possibilities exist. But the alleged tactic which Dark Angel described (download work, abort and report, repeat) does not sound like it would be effective to create a denial-of-service condition.

What already happened:
  • At ODLK, a few users held as many tasks in progress that the project's work generator stopped for as long as no results came in.
  • At TN-Grid, the work generator has not been fast enough to satisfy all regular work requests during an FB sprint.
    (Of course, this condition was created by the participating teams combined. I don't know if a single team among those who are active in sprints can do this alone.)
  • At a sprint at RakeSearch in 2018, the validator was no longer able to keep up with the rate of results turned in. The admin started more validator processes, which mostly solved the validation backlog. But from that point on, almost no new work could be had anymore. I suspect database performance was too much of a bottleneck.
    (Ditto, this condition was created by all teams combined. Maybe a single team among the active ones could not have had such a large result rate.)
  • Wasn't the WEP-M+2 server overwhelmed during the June sprint? I didn't take part in that one, didn't observe what happened, and can't tell how many users or teams were too much for it.
Further, my observation is that some projects definitely have a rather limited validation rate, either per host or per user; I don't know. Whether this rate is the respective project's global validation rate across all hosts or users, I don't know either. If it would be, then a single user with many results to report (from several days work of several good computers) could make the validator busy for hours.
 
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Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
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No.
And I'm here, on your turf, calling your team out for dirty play. TaaT is well known for deliberately choking project servers when you're ahead on sprints to prevent other teams from returning completed work.
Do you have any specific examples? Before your teammates all respond back about me being Donald Trump, screw off, bla bla bla(which is hilarious because I posted a Joe Biden "shut up man" meme to @VietOZ awhile back and then 2 days later was told I'm Donald Trump by somebody else) this is a legitimate question that I'm interested in hearing the answer to. I've been involved in FB pretty much all of this year and haven't witnessed anything close to that. There was Rakesearch this year where Stefan grabbed all the WU's(and completed them well before the sprint was over), but that was just luck based on his timezone and the project not having enough work. I probably have had to abort a few WU's here and there(not recently) just from being relatively new to the competition and hardware I have, but nothing close to taking all the work with no intention of completing it. As far as your statement about team hopping that confuses me as well. Stefan has given a couple of clear examples(I think on the ODLK forum or Rakesearch forum? I'd have to go look) of times we had team hopped to help [H] or another friendly team, but it's extremely few and far between. Every single Sprint there are members jumping in between XS and TSBT just trying to prevent us from getting 2nd(which backfires at least half the time) and then occasionally I see UKBT/TSBT/XS members going back and forth(less recently). That's not a call out, it's a fact. It's also not against the rules, so while I don't agree with it and think it's gamesmanship I try not to let it get to me too much. I understand XS and TSBT being basically one team(in which case I would think they should get 1 vote), but when I saw it happen a few times with UK BOINC Team it's like "Man this doesn't seem right"

AFAIK we're still kickin'
You guys should be concern about P3D instead because we moved our yearly honor run for Movieman back to his birthday in February. DA's statement was true, not a single WU was aborted. And the damn ODLK's server didn't go down neither. Calling us out ain't doing any good. We looked at the performances and respect from there. Not the trash talking.
Sure, your dual Epyc/s made some noise. I lost hands down.I can't say sheit in it. But that doesn't mean we're scared of you ... or anyone in the planet.
Imagine OZ on P3D? ... yah ... not good calling us out. Shoulda recruit me instead :D
Hint: I don't like P3D neither

When the price is right :D j/k

Huey Lewis
:p Man I tried to recruit you into our internal Milkyway@home competition. I offered to let you in on it you just had to change your team affiliation on Milkway to TeAm Anandtech. FWIW outside of Bluestang giving me a small amount of advice once a long time ago on Hardforum with something(which he prefaced with "I shouldn't help you because you're not on my team" which I was so new to this stuff I thought he meant [H] so I crunched a few million points for them afterward to thank Bluestang for helping :D) You are the only member of XS that I interact with that has ever tried to be helpful or even remotely friendly. I'm not at all saying everybody at XS is jerks or anything like that, it's probably more that every interaction starts off on the wrong foot, but you seem to draw the line at telling me I don't know how to read, where others are dropping F bombs all over Sebastiens own forum complaining about him, calling people all kinds of names all over other forums, etc.

I am surprised now that cooler heads prevail though and hindsight is 20/20 that anybody thinks what happened at ODLK was a good thing or something that should have happened. A server being ran out of tasks isn't a good thing. I'm guessing that wasn't the original intent. The server stayed up(well as much as the raspberry pi with a fan pointed at it or whatever that server is can) but only because they have a limit on total outstanding tasks. There is still another non XS/TSBT (and non TAAT) member that speculatively bunkers ODLK occasionally. That server can't handle a sprint it shouldn't' even be in the list. I'm surprised anybody from XS doesn't look back at that and think both "man Icecold was kind of a dick about all of that BUT we also should not have ran that server totally out of tasks and sat on them for days". It had already been voted for by the coalition, though, and winning is everything.

I've been wanting to use this meme again but the sprint got cancelled, but I guess it's semi relevant:

4knr05.jpg
 
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Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
1,090
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LOL, ignore my last post. There is no common ground here. I tried to keep it friendly and try to understand both sides, but when you guys are dropping bunkers on every team you can below or near us in the marathons there is no common ground and it's clearly not a friendly competition. Man when did Bluestang and Megacruncher become members of Seti Germany? Cosmology stats:

Cosmology.PNG
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
No.
And I'm here, on your turf, calling your team out for dirty play. TaaT is well known for deliberately choking project servers when you're ahead on sprints to prevent other teams from returning completed work. You do it by effectively DDoSing them, ie downloading massive amounts of work you have no intention of completing, aborting it, then downloading again and again. It's a tactic used by your team members every time you get even a hair in front on any sprint. You're also hypocrites, bleating and crying when other teams help each other while you do exactly the same thing and have been doing it for a long time. You team-hop when it suits you and cry about it when someone else uses your own tactics against you.
Call ME a "flat earther"? You're pathetic.
Your "well known" is absolutely false. It is ACTUALLY known that TaaT does not ever intentionally do anything like that.

Please give specific examples of the bolded part actually happening. I'm willing to bet that you can't.

The only time it has ever even sort of happened that I know of was the WEP-M+2 (wanless2) sprint this spring, and that was only because the server crashed and bearnol shut it down instead of fixing it so that the results could not be returned, not because of anything that anyone here did, and it wasn't just TaaT trying to get work from the project.

I know some people complained about the RakeSearch sprint, but again that was entirely because the server stopped giving out work because there wasn't any work left to do on the current project at the time. The admin even jumped in and released all of the remaining work that they did have available, and a few people on our team just happened to be lucky enough to grab what little was there, and returned every single work unit when they were completed.
 
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Skillz

Senior member
Feb 14, 2014
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No.
And I'm here, on your turf, calling your team out for dirty play. TaaT is well known for deliberately choking project servers when you're ahead on sprints to prevent other teams from returning completed work. You do it by effectively DDoSing them, ie downloading massive amounts of work you have no intention of completing, aborting it, then downloading again and again. It's a tactic used by your team members every time you get even a hair in front on any sprint.

False. No one, not a single team, your team, this team or any other team deliberately does this. Show me proof where that's happened. Most of these projects we "play" on can't handle what we throw at it.

You're also hypocrites, bleating and crying when other teams help each other while you do exactly the same thing and have been doing it for a long time. You team-hop when it suits you and cry about it when someone else uses your own tactics against you.
Call ME a "flat earther"? You're pathetic.

XSTSBTSUSA threw that stone, first. Facts. [H] when they were active in FB never once switched teams until XS started bumping other teams to push them in ahead of [H] in other projects.

XSTSBTSUSA was the first to start team switching to deliberately bump other teams ahead. Everything since then is just in retaliation to that.

XSTSBTSUSA was the first team to switch teams to help each other which was more apparent when TSBT was in L2 last year and could easily handle beating every team in L2 and would then jump to XS to help them.

I'm just tired of all this your doing this and bla bla bla
You guys here like to have someone to blame, Were not your boogieman. This is sport not pattycake or marbles, take your lumps like men just like we do.
You had a good run but beat us late on that last sprint, and guess what, we congratulated you, grow up, the end game is we are helping humanity and
using are hard earned to pay for it, because we want to help, If you join FB, guess what it's sport, so we are going to win or at least give it our best**.

**That includes, but not limited to, doing unsportsman like tactics of dumping points for a team that isn't yours, but is a threat to the team that's a threat to you. This is no speculation. XS and TSBT have been doing it for years now. Before you say "other teams have done it to us" just remember, it was in retaliation of your group of people throwing that first stone. Period.


There's no collation or secret cabal, in fact we always told you what we do and were doing before or after the sprints, Plus we know you can see mostly what's going on in the stats pages.
But again seems you must have some conspiracy if something goes down, things don't work out or you guys just can't get it together then you Pivot and blame XS.
But I guess the biggest reason is were more user friendly then you guys, seems your team isn't too well liked and now your trying to project that on us.
That's a Trumpism I learned this election, got no real facts, everything points back to your own actions, well Pivot and blame someone else.

That's funny. Your team does the exact same thing by accusing us of sabotaging a project server to prevent anyone else from getting work or being able to access it. Neither are true as I don't believe any team would deliberately DDOS a project server or horde all the tasks so no one else can get any. The facts are a lot of these projects just can't handle the sheer amount of computational power we can throw at them within' a 24 hour time frame.


I know of at least one team that doesn't even bother with Formula-BOINC anymore because of the unsportsman like tactics your team does. Real user friendly. Let me tell ya. More like anti-competitive team.

The fact is we are a solid team made up of good people that like to help, we offer help, try to help and even help if it means a lot to someone and we feel that.

Some of your members are pretty helpful. No doubt there.

But FB will never be gone, I think the last 2 years have shown that it needs to do 3 things, rewrite the code, get better at servicing us the crunchers and talk to the Server managers of each program that commits to FB on a regular basis and make them commit to some terms. We can help them to get involved. Make them checklists and let them know when they can be chosen and what to check. We have a lot to offer lots of WU's in just 4 days. Even if the FB owner doesn't step up soon, people have offered to help. If not I'll write one myself, so no worries here.

Big talk there. If you've got the ability to do it, then do it.

In conclusion being Crunchers we are in a category of mostly type 1 personalities (thanks SaM) and we all like to win, so take the whining out and put that to work making this competition a better event, No bunkering, it gets announced and we go. Make a better way of choosing events, some kind of random generator or something, and every week let every program know that they could be chosen this week.

No doubt we need to make the competition better. That could very easily start with teams stopping the shady team switching. ;)

I don't come here much, but I know deep down that this is a solid and good hearted team, so lets act like one.

Steve - SystemViper - XtremeSystems 4ever

Thanks.

It's really cool that you guys are so cool amongst one another and switch around helping each team out. Good on you.
It's not cool that you guys bump teams your not associated with just because it can take points away from us which in turn helps your teams.

What's going to happen is those anti competitive, unsportsman like tactics your team does will cause teams to quit FB, just as [H] has already done.
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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and then occasionally I see UKBT/TSBT/XS members going back and forth(less recently).
I don't watch these things closely, but I think UBT's help to TSBT was a one-off thing (and ineffective, because in a GPU sprint). UBT got some help back in the CPU sprint which followed, AFAIR without consequences to the rankings.
 

StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
5,459
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Well, if anybody establishes his own contest series, he can of course come up with the modus and rules.

AFAIU he didn't actually mean "no bunkering" though but "no lead time between announcement and start". (Which would have downsides on its own.)